The Surgery

I received a letter from Three a few weeks back. Seems they were happy to throw a new handset at me, for another two years of customer loyalty. Who was I to argue?

(Incidentally, hear my discourse about disposable technology with Graeme on Tech Talk Radio.)

After having a quick look at the handsets and plans on offer, I decided to upgrade from the $49/month plan to the $69/month plan, and get the “free” Sony Ericsson W850i.

This thread is primarily about my initial impression of the phone and some of its more interesting features. You would have already anticipated that the phone can make and receive calls, send text messages, store numbers and such things.

The First of two handsets. The staff at Three were very helpful and keen to sign me up for another two years. I unpacked my new toy as soon as I got home.

Here’s what was included in the box:

• The phone
• Manual
• PC Suite CD-ROM
• Handsfree adapter cable, which runs out to a 3.5mm in-line socket (cool)
• Handsfree ear-plug headset thingy
• Charger
• USB cable
• 1GB MS DUO memory card, already fitted in the phone — good that this is supplied by Three, to suppement the phone’s internal 16MB. The phone will support MS DUO cards up to 2GB.

Here’s what wasn’t included in the box, but would have been nice:

• A pouch, cover or protector of some sort … even a basic flimsy one would have been good
• A USB adapter so you can plug your MS DUO card straight into your PC. These are inexpensive, and I’ve already got one, but a lot of people would find one of these useful I suspect, especially if they’d never owned a Sony Ericsson.

Anyway I dropped in the SIM card, plugged in the charger and powered up the phone. It’s a WCDMA “3G” handset (not HSDPA) and operates on the GSM 900 / 1800 / 1900 and UMTS 2100 MHz bands. My handset found the 3 network straight away and connected without any issues.

I copied the contents of my SIM card over to the phone memory, which worked a treat. (My last phone was a Sony Ericsson Z800i so details in the contact cards were formatted correctly.)

Everything worked as expected. Except the camera. I received a strange message when trying to start the camera, which said “another application is running”. There is an option to view running applications - I checked but there was nothing listed. After wasting considerable time I decided to do a Master Reset, which didn’t fix the problem either. After a phone call to 3 Customer Care I took the phone back and they exchanged it, no questions asked. The camera worked on the next one.

This “application is running” issue with the camera appears to be quite common, if you Google the error message. Maybe it’s caused by the carriers’ branding of the handsets? The only solution appears to be a return-to-depot replacement at this stage.

Speaking of carrier branding, the other strange thing is that there is no “power on” LED which blinks at you. That is to say, it’s there in the phone, but doesn’t do anything. So when you leave the phone in a dark room for example, you can’t find it by the blinking LED which should be working on top of the phone. You also don’t know if it’s turned on or off without picking it up and pressing buttons to make the display light up. A bit annoying.

Walkman Phone. Yes it really is a Walkman phone. Press the orange button below the screen and this accesses the Walkman controls. Opening the “My Music” folder, you can navigate tracks by Artist, Album, Track, playlist or online channels. For MP3 files, it gets all this information (as well as the thumbnail album-art image) from the ID3 tag in the file. Very cool. I like the interface.

I have noticed, however, on several podcasts which I am playing from the memory stick, that the phone gets about 20 or 30 minutes into the track before it simply stops with either the words “Failed” or “Playback Failed” in the middle of the screen. These same tracks play fine on my old JNC player and the media player on my PC. More investigation needed.  Don’t throw out your MP3 player just yet.

Supplied PC software. Yeah, whatever. Has Sony learnt nothing from dodgy social experiments like SonicStage? The phone looks like a USB storage device to your PC; just plug the phone in and use Windows Explorer or the Ubuntu File Browser to drag and drop files into the phone’s memory or storage card.

Supplied phone software. The current software version of the phone is CXC1250570 - R1ED001 - 060831.

The phone does have a very clever “Update service”, which allows you to take advantage of its internet connectivity by checking the Sony Ericsson website for software updates. Select this and the phone says “Searching for update” while it connects and checks the internal software version against whatever is current. Apparently my phone “already has the latest software”. (So much for fixing that MP3 problem with a software upgrade!)

There is also a reminder feature, which can prompt you once a month to check for software updates, or even check every time the phone is powered on.

Send to blog. This would be a tremendously useful feature, if only we knew how to configure it for something other than Blogger. There’s a context-menu item when viewing photos: click More > Send, and in addition to “Send as Picture Message”, “Send as Email”, “Send via Bluetooth” and “Send via Infrared”, there’s a “Send to blog” option. Awesome! Except it tries to connect to Blogger and set up a new Blogspot account.

After considerable Googling I have been unable to find where and how to change the settings behind this (otherwise) very useful feature. Any takers?

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 1:16 am and is filed under Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.