Music sounds good
We took a quick look at the Walkman function earlier, but let’s look more in-depth at music on the W380 overall. This is a Walkman handset so this is the area one would expect it to excel in, and, for its market segment, it does a good job. The Walkman player makes browsing and playing your music easy, even if it isn’t the Walkman 3.0 player found in some of the higher-end handsets.
The W380i features one external speaker, located on the top of the handset when closed. It actually does a decent job of playing music although the operative word here is ‘decent’. You aren’t going to be breaking your W380 out as an impromptu Hi-Fi, but for letting others around you hear a music track it will do the job well enough. The sound produced isn’t overly tinny and the volume level is adequate if not particularly loud.
The earphones are of the in-ear variety, rather than the little bud ones. This author prefers the bud ones that actually lodge inside the ear canal, but the earphones bundled with the W380i are good enough. In terms of sound quality I was pleased; they produced a nice clear sound. The earphones come in two parts; a ‘base’ part that plugs into the handset using a Fast port connector and a secondary part that uses a 3.5mm jack to plug into the base part. This is both annoying and satisfactory at the same time. The annoyance stems from the somewhat redundant connection process that sees the use of two different connections, a Fast port connection and a 3.5 mm jack. On the other hand the inclusion of the 3.5 mm jack does afford the user ability to use his own earphones. It would be more elegant to just use a single 3.5 mm jack as the earphone connection, but Sony Ericsson appears to be committed to Fast port.
The bundled earphones don’t come with an in-line remote capable of practical music control. Rather the handset offers external music controls mounted on the top of the handset, which have a vague resemblance to brail. These controls take the form of three touch sensitive buttons and an OLED display build into the top of the handset. When you start music playback and close the handset you can use these buttons to skip between tracks as well as pause and start them. The display will show the currently playing track when the music is actually playing and a handset status display when the music is stopped. The display looked somewhat ‘fuzzy’ in that it wasn’t particularly crisp or bright, but it is legible and its appearance does compliment the handset’s design.
Now for those of you worried that the music controls may be pressed by accident whilst in a pocket you needn’t fear because the controls do need an actual press rather than a light glance (or in the case of the Samsung U600 a wrong look). Leaving the handset alone for a while puts it into standby mode (although the music will still play of course), and it takes two presses of the external buttons to actually change a music track. Hence, even if you did manage to press one of the controls by accident, it would take another press to actually do anything.
The W380i comes bundled with a 512 MB Memory Stick Micro M2 card. This is at the lower end of the memory stick range so some users may wish to upgrade to at least a 1 GB stick. As mentioned above, the memory stick slot is rather annoyingly situated under the battery cover, making hot swapping possible, since the battery doesn’t need to be removed, but cumbersome.