The design of the latest addition to the Sony Ericsson Walkman family, the W302, is nothing ground breaking but that doesn’t mean to say its not stylish. Beautifully put together and with an excellent build quality, the W302 definitely sticks to the high standards of its predecessors with a brushed black metal finish up front and on the slip free rear surface.
As stated the design concept is nothing new but the W302 leaves a very nice first impression. Its size I imagine is also a big factor in its appeal as it measures in at a sleek 100 x 46 x 10.5mm and weighs in at a mere 78 g making it a very pocket friendly little phone. Not that you’ll want to hide the phone away in your pocket as it’s minimalist design hits all the right notes.
As with similar phones in the Sony Ericsson Walkman range, the keypad is clearly cut and well spaced which makes using the relatively small keys far easier then you would first anticipate. On the left side there’s the standard dedicated walkman key which takes you directly into the music player and on the right are the volume controls and the camera key.
The W302 is equipped with the basic Sony Ericsson BST-33 Li-Polymer battery with a capacity of 950 mAh. It’s quoted at up to 300 hours of standby time and up to 7 hours of talk time which isn’t too shabby. It also comes with 20MB of internal memory but thanks to the Memory Stick Micro (M2) card slot there is the potential for up to 4GB, with a standard 512 card coming in the box with the phone.
Feature wise the quad-band W302 doesn’t have the high-tech goodies of the more advanced phones on today’s market however this is to be expected as it is a lower midrange device which focuses on combining exceptional music capabilities with a more than affordable price tag. This allows us at Mobiles.co.uk to be able to offer some amazing deals for example on either O2 or Orange at £35 a month, 600 mins, unlimited texts with 11 months free!! This tactic is very similar to previously launched phones by Sony such as the T303 which basically focussed on its design delivering a sleek and stylish phone in a range of colours. This does ultimately mean that the W302 is without 3G support, accelerometer or media manager however the W302 does offer an excellent music orientated performance with the latest version of the Sony Ericsson Walkman software, stereo Bluetooth and FM radio that supports RDS.
On a brighter note the phone does feature the unique TrackID music recognition service. If you want to get the name of a track that’s playing on the radio, you just fire it up, it records several seconds from it and gives back the name and artist after looking up the Gracenote servers (data charges apply if you are not on a flat rate data plan). You can also use the TrackID service to record a sample of a track through the handset microphone. The W302 also has a 2 megapixel camera, which lacks auto focus but has the Cyber-shot style interface that has been lacking on walkman handsets since the W910 which I thought was a nice touch.
Overall it has to be said hat the W302 is without a doubt a lovely looking phone and a very sound performer. In terms of features it seems that less is more with Sony Ericsson focusing on why people by Walkman phones to deliver an attractive phone with top of the range music abilities. The top music package, slim profile and very attractive price makes this a definite winner in my books.
