Sony Ericsson W850i

Available Q3 2006
20th May 2006

The Sony Ericsson W850i is a "Walkman" branded 3G slider phone. It is Sony Ericsson's first sliding handset, and (along with the new W710 clamshell), it brings the number of "Walkman" phones in Sony Ericsson's range into double digits.

In basic technical terms, the Sony Ericsson W850i is a pretty conventional up-to-date 3G phone. There's a 2" (51mm) 240x320 pixel display, a 2 megapixel camera plus secondary video calling camera, expandable memory and stereo Bluetooth, plus the Walkman multimedia suite and an FM radio. It weighs 116 grams and measures 98x47x21mm.

The internal memory is just 64Mb, but the Sony Ericsson W850i comes with a 1Gb Memory Stick Pro Duo card which is expandable to 4Gb. We reckon that's good for about 16 albums worth of material in the standard configuration, up to 64 albums with a 4Gb card.. which is plenty.

The software package on the W850i is pretty comprehensive. There's an upgraded version of the Walkman player, called the "Advanced Walkman 2.0 Music Player", TrackID, plus an email client (with push email support), web browser with Flash support, RSS news reader and a whole host of other multimedia and personal information management applications. There's also an optional media stand to plug the W850i into, turning it into a mini hifi system.

The W850i is a tri-band GSM 900/1800/1900 phone with UMTS 2100 for 3G connectivity, and Sony Ericsson intend to sell it into the Europe, Middle East and Africa markets during Q3 2006. There are two colours available, "Precious Black" and "Golden White". Surprisingly, there seems to be no non-Walkman version of this handset available, which is a shame.

It's quite a smart looking phone, and it shows just how aggressively Sony Ericsson are pursuing the music phone market. As we said earlier, with the current batch of releases, Sony Ericsson now have 10 "Walkman" branded phones. In branding terms, that's a stronger position than Sony Ericsson's rivals who don't have access to the same sort of branding. Motorola tried and failed to capitalise on iTunes with the ROKR E1, but since then their marketing muddle has been a disaster. In our view, Sony Ericsson are the clear leaders in this market niche.

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