Advantages
- Stylish design and colour schemes
- External touch-sensitive music controls with vibration feedback
- 512 MB M2 Memory Stick Micro bundled with handset
- Walkman player
- FM radio with RDS
- EDGE support
- Gesture control
Disadvantages
- Memory card slot is under back cover
- Relatively poor camera & what’s up with the camera position?
- High price point in comparison to feature set
- Low internal memory at 14 MB
- No 3G for downloading music quickly
- No ‘bud’ earphones
The thing that struck me about the W380 was how good it looks. Now to be fair looks are highly subjective and some may not agree with my appraisal of the W380’s design, but I would argue that it has a simple and clean look, which belies an elegant little handset that can cut a dash with the best of them. It’s a lower-end handset and this is quite apparent in its feature set, which is devoid of some of the things that one would expect in even higher end mid-range handsets. However, the feature set isn’t what you should be looking at when deciding whether to buy this handset as its real strengths lie elsewhere.
The box comes with the usual supplies of battery, charger, manuals, software CD, data cable, and earphones, along with the handset itself of course! The box itself is a small square effort, which is suggestive of the lower end status of this handset as opposed to the larger and more luxurious packaging given with the likes of the W960.
Simple & elegant
The W380‘s main advantage lies in its simplicity. With the flip closed the handset is compact and looks quite sleek thanks to the slanted edges, which also help to impart a technical or perhaps even futuristic look to the handset. Taking a tour around the handset we can see the main hardware points; the Fastport on the left hand side, used for charging, earphones and cable connections; the right hand side features the volume keys, and the top and bottom edges are unadorned, save for a Walkman logo on the bottom edge. The back of the handset is about as interesting as handset back’s tend to be; we have the usual Sony Ericsson logo and a lock switch for the touch sensitive keys on the front.
