My new phone- the Sony Ericsson W350i

Ok. I went out and bought a new phone. Finally. It was long awaited by a lot people, excluding me. While the world was frantically buying phones with features of very little use, throwing out perfectly working, and convenient phones for fanciful but cumbersome ones, I was happily putting my trusted old Nokia 2600 to good use.

It served me well for 4 long years now- I never had an issue with battery life, though I had to get the exterior panel changed twice (it had more to with my rough handling of the phone than anything else). But of late a very peculiar problem cropped up. The battery was growing- literally. It was expanding and pushing the casing out. Now that was serious. I had heard enough reports of batteries exploding and I certainly didn’t want to be one of those unfortunate poor souls to have their ear, face or any other body part blown off my a Li Ion battery.

So I went off to buy a phone- to indulge in an activity, because of the involvement of millions of people in which, blokes like me make a comfortable living ( my company makes cell phone chips btw) . I had a look at the phones on display and was actually bewildered at the array of choices present. You had phones that could just about make and receive calls, and you had those which took photos, fetched your mail, played your music, and still let you make calls. But selecting a phone was easy- I wanted a flip phone, with camera, Bluetooth, music player and radio. I chose a model which offered all these at possibly the lowest price and haggled with the guy at the sales counter to give me a good price for my existing “explosive” phone, which he did. It was closing time and I figured out he hadn’t managed that day’s sales target and was willing to stretch the price a little bit in my favor. It was the Sony Ericsson W350i. The ‘w’ was indicative of Sony’s Walkman heritage and I thought out it would be a promising music player also.

When I came home the first thing I noticed about the phone was its size. Sure size zero was quite the rage with females some time ago, but this was taking things really too far, besides I didn’t want my phone to be female. The phone was really slim, and hardly had the width of a match box, which I actually found convenient considering that I have small hands. It has a flap which when closed doubles up as the user interface for the music player. I totally loved this concept. I really didn’t have to open up the phone and use the myriad keys to play music- all I wanted to do was pause, play, next and stop and these were all there as big chunky buttons right there on the flap. Very neat indeed.

One very useful thing about the phone is that when the flap is closed (when you are not using the phone’s key pad) it is in the music player mode. So you can use it just like an iPod. The sound quality is excellent with the bass coming out loud and clear. This I think is more to do with the superior headphones that are provided with the handset. Another useful feature is the ability to directly plug in a 3.5 mm audio jack using a small adapter. This is extremely convenient when you want to hook up the phone with that expensive pair of headphones you bought or a larger speaker system.

The other things about the phone are fairly standard. The radio is good, without giving a pause while changing stations. My old Philips Nike device takes a long time to switch from one station to the other. The Bluetooth and USB connectivity are great. The menu is also fairly intuitive, which considering that it’s not from Nokia is quite surprising.

All in all, a great phone!!!. One more thing I did notice. Buying a new phone does make you happy, at least for a day! I guess that’s why mobile sales are zooming the world over.