Sony Ericsson W580 / S500

The Sony Ericsson W580 is one of the newest phones that has been given the distinction of being titled Walkman after the famous Sony music players. As a slider phone, it has all of the great features you would expect from a modern phone, with the added compactness of a keypad that can be slid under the LCD at any time, making it the perfect size to carry just about anywhere. Unfortunately though, true to Sony Ericsson style, the W580 has the makings for an excellent cell phone - but the engineers seem to have left out a few critical features that should be standard in every mid to high end phone hitting the market these days.

Most people will buy the Sony Ericsson W580 for its digital music capabilities, as that is the major marketing force for this phone. The Walkman logo is emblazoned all over the place just to make sure everyone knows that this phone can double as a phone and an iPod competitor. The sound quality is good, and with the addition of a Memory Stick Pro Duo, anyone can increase the capacity of the phone's memory in a matter of seconds. To make the Sony Ericsson W580, a 2 megapixel camera and an excellent display capable of 262 thousand colors has also been included.

When considering a modern phone though, while all of the gadgets and gizmos like cameras and music players are hip and cool - what you really need to check out are the hard specifications of the phone. Sony Ericsson took the right approach by offering the W580 in a hip slider model that is fairly light weight and relatively small (in comparison to some other Sony Ericsson models). Furthermore, the W580 is a world phone that can access GSM on quad band so it can be used anywhere with the simple switch of a SIM card.

Unfortunately, despite all of the great features packed into the phone, like Bluetooth, the music player, the 2 megapixel camera and the impressive battery life of up to 9 hours of talk time and 370 hours of standby time, Sony Ericsson's designers seemed to forget a few features. One of the most glaring problems is the lack of 3G and Wi-Fi capability. It seems as though every time Sony Ericsson makes a phone that has some great features, they always leave out some specifications that really should have been included. On the positive side though, because of the huge community of Sony Ericsson fans, there are plenty of additional software and firmware updates that can make the phone uniquely yours in a matter of hours.

Pros

• Stylish design
• One of the best music players on the market
• Impressive battery life
• Fantastic display and form factor
• Camera works like a charm
• Expandable memory
• Soon to be highly customizable

Cons

• No 3G capability
• No Wi-Fi capability
• Some of the features are not useful

Overall

The Sony Ericsson W580 is really a better media player than it is a phone. Sure, it is easily customized, has all kinds of cool features, and has an impressive battery life - but all of the media items that this phone is designed around end up eclipsing what the phone is designed for - to talk on. Overall, this phone would have been fantastic if it came out last year, but it really does not provide any cutting edge technology that should be present in phones of this caliber in 2007.