I picked up a new mobile phone today, courtesy of my wonderful brother – a Sony Ericsson W800i. Until two days ago I had never heard of it; I’m not really one for keeping up with the latest in phones, although I do like mine to have a lot of functionality – Bluetooth, tri-band etc. My T610 has been fantastic for the past two years but has developed an annoying problem with the navigation joystick in that every time I pressed ‘down’ it thought I meant ‘select’. I’ve sent far too many text messages by accident with that phone. Thanks to my brother I now have the latest incarnation of this range.

I’ve spent a little time today getting myself set up and am pleased to say that it has been extremely easy and I haven’t had to look at the manual once. The phone itself is aesthetically pleasing, if a little garish with it’s orange theme, and has some great features such as a loudspeaker, MP3 playback, 550Mb (yes, half a gigabyte!) of storage and a 2 megapixel camera with a light. I’ve taken a couple of photos and uploaded them to Flickr – see for yourself how good it is.

I’ve had loads of phones over the years, but the series of camera phones from the T68i, T610, T630 (owned by my wife) and now my W800i must be the best series of phones that I’ve seen. I used to swear by Nokias with (what I thought was) their very friendly user interface but their software started to get buggy right around the time they released the 7110. I didn’t fancy paying for my phone software to be upgraded when I felt it should have been tried and tested in the first place. Sony Ericsson phones seem to be relatively bug-free as well as extremely easy to use; since switching I haven’t looked back.

The main ‘selling point’ of the phone is its Walkman functionality, but as I already have an iPod I think that I’ll be making most use of the camera, especially for mobile photo blogging!