The last navigation button of note is the central navigation pad. Depending upon your point of view and/or mood this is either reminiscent of a tech look or is somewhat feminine in an Art Deco sense. Either way it is functional. The top part of the pad contains an engraved Walkman icon, which, when pressed from the main menu, will activate the Walkman player.
What’s on the menu?
Now that we’ve seen how to navigate the menu system let’s look at what there is to navigate. The menu system contains the usual features one expects from a Sony Ericsson handset at this level of the market. I shall briefly detail the more mundane items, but as most will already be familiar with these options I shan’t spend too much time on them.
The main menu is displayed as a 3×4 grid, making twelve menu options in total. Standard fare includes Messaging, Contacts and Internet. These are largely self explanatory and contain all the usual features found in other low end Sony Ericsson handsets.
The Entertainment menu offers a pleasant surprise by containing three games, at least one of which the author loves (see if you can guess which one); Extreme Air Snowboarding, Sims 2 and the ever popular QuadraPop. The Entertainment menu also contains the TrackID feature, which should be included in all handsets in this author’s opinion.
The W380i comes pre-loaded with a single Java application; Music Mate 2, which allows you to compose your own music. Granted this isn’t likely to be a deal breaker for many, but it is a nice little addition to the handset and compliments its Walkman image. Michell mentioned that the W890 was rather sparse when it came to pre-installed apps and that seems fair comment given the higher-end nature of the W890, but in the case of the W380i a single application doesn’t feel out of place although it would have been nice to have others of course, say the Java Gmail client.
Music Mate 2 is located in the Applications folder within the File Manager. The File Manager feature is actually rather good and it’s nice to see Sony Ericsson making these sorts of things available on their lower end handsets as well as those nearer the top of the market. The File Manager allows you to browse through all the files on your handset and organises them into various folders depending upon what sort of data they contain e.g. videos in the video folder, etc. You can view, delete, copy, and move files using the File Manager and you can sort files within folders based upon different criteria e.g. date, file type, etc. Viewing the small number of pre-installed pictures present in the Pictures folder proved to be a little slower than one would have liked, and this makes one wonder how the handset would respond if there were a large number of images present. Images can be sorted into a list mode, which only displays the file name rather than a thumbnail of the image and this greatly speeds up navigating a list of images.
