Sony Ericsson W350 (W350i / W350a / W350c)

Discontinued
8th January 2008

A quick glance of the specifications of the Sony Ericsson W350 are misleading. On paper, the W350 looks like a fairly low-end "Walkman" phone.. but when you actually see it, then you can tell that this is something pretty unique.

As with the Motorola ROKR E8, the Sony Ericsson W350 does a pretty good job at pretending to be a dedicated multimedia player with the unusual flip keypad mechanism. On the outside are a set of very attractive media control buttons, but flip the phone open and there's a standard numeric keypad inside.

This is also a very lightweight phone, the Sony Ericsson W350 comes in at just 10.5mm thick and it weighs only 80 grams. Inevitably, this diminutive form factor means that the W350 isn't as highly specified as many phones, but we feel that it will have a certain appeal to consumers.

Get past the novel flip mechanism, and the Sony Ericsson W350 is a pretty straightforward and slightly basic phone. There's a 1.9" 176 x 220 pixel display, 1.3 megapixel camera, stereo Bluetooth and of course Sony Ericsson's Walkman media player. Talktime is a maximum of 7 hours with up to 15 hours of music playback time.

A 512MB Memory Stick Micro card is included in the standard sales package, although most users will probably want to upgrade that. Sony Ericsson haven't stated what the maximum capacity of the W350 is, but we're pretty sure that it is expandable to 2GB.

Underneath it all, this is a tri-band GSM phone with GPRS and EDGE data. In the US it will come in a 850/1800/1900 MHz version called the W350a - China and the rest of the world will have tri-band 900/1800/1900 MHz variants called the W350c and W350i respectively.

Sony Ericsson have announced four different colour variants of the W350, Electric Black (Black/Orange), Hypnotic Black (Black/Purple), Ice Blue and Graphic White (not pictured).

It's certainly not the most high-tech phone on the market, but it will appeal to those consumers who really want a compact music player that can also make phone calls, while looking good into the bargain. One thing that we particularly like about this phone is the design detailing, you can see more of it at the bottom of the page..

Sony Ericsson say that the W350i / W350a / W350c should be available from Q2 2008, but did not give any guidance on price.