The Sony Ericsson W300i is a Walkman-branded clamshell phone that brings the Walkman phone series to the mass market. Sony Ericsson have shaved functionality off the phone in order to bring the cost down, but the core music function is top notch.

Overall the W300i is a good all-round phone with excellent music capabilities for the price. Some users are reporting that the phone freezes and has to be returned to the shop, so be aware of this and the other shortcomings of the phone before you decide whether or not to buy. A safer bet is the more expensive W810i.

Dimensions 90 x 47 x 24 mm Weight 94 g

The Sony Ericsson W300i is a compact clamshell phone that feels good in hand. If you have seen or used the Sony Ericsson Z525 then you’ll notice the resemblance. The W300i comes in two colors: Shadow Black and Shimmering White. We have the Shadow Black for this review. It’s a light phone at 3.3 ounces and has a two-tone body (black and silver in this case) that gives the phone a modern look.

A sparkling clear 262,144 color TFT screen gives its users optimal image viewing be it while surfing the web, or viewing pictures that you take in its easy to use camera. The phone automatically renders full web pages to suit your screen leading to effortless surfing.

Just about as low resolution as they get, the VGA camera of the W300i both records video and shoots stills, failing spectacularly at producing results one would want to share with anyone - even though doing so is an intuitive process be it via MMS, e-mail or even Bluetooth. In addition to suffering from an ever-present blue tint, the low resolution makes the camera unsuitable for all but the most basic photography needs; its interface is decidedly un-cameralike; and saving pictures is slow - but on the upside, there's enough storage for about a gazillion pictures.

The device uses a Lithium-Polymeric battery with the capacity of 900 mAh and provides ample battery life despite the extensive features that the phone offers. With 5 hours of talk time and 10 days of standby, the W300i is one of very few phones which chalk up a full score in the battery life department - and it doesn't hurt that it can play back music for up to 15 hours straight in its MP3 only mode either.

As a music player, the W300i--which handles MP3 and AAC music tracks--works well, aside from some inconveniences. It has 23MB of internal memory plus a Memory Stick Micro card slot. I loaded music easily via Sony Ericsson's included Disc2Phone software, which curiously didn't allow me to create playlists on the PC itself. To do that, I had to select individual tracks on the phone. Our test unit readily accepted a few albums, whose songs I could then search for on the phone by artist, track, or playlist.

The Sony Ericsson W300i has over 20MB of internal storage space out of the box (about 23MB on our unit). You can download additional applications, ringtones, images and videos from the web. The Sony Ericsson WAP portal offers some free applications such as World Clock, Converter and more. It’s worth a look. Once you’ve downloaded the jar files, you will find them in the Games folder by default.

Like the W710i and the K790a, the Sony Ericsson W300i has a Memory Stick Micro (M2) slot for storage and supports up to 1GB Memory Stick Micro cards. The Memory Stick PRO Duo used in the W810i would have been too big to fit in the W300i’s petite body. The tiny Memory Stick Micro, developed by Sony and SanDisk, is about one quarter the size of Memory Stick PRO Duo and is compatible with Memory Stick PRO card readers with an adapter. Oddly, Sony Ericsson included a 256MB Memory Stick Micro card with the W300i but no adapter.

The Sony Ericsson W300i is a quad-band phone operating on the 850/900/1800//19000MHz frequencies, and will work anywhere in the world where GSM services are available.

The voice quality is crisp with no distortion and the volume is high. You can control the incoming volume using the music controls on the left side of the W300i. The Sony Ericsson supports most phone features such as speed dial (1-9), redial, conference call, call waiting, call forwarding, two voice lines, call recording, speakerphone and more. It also comes with a voice dialing feature, though not true voice command, which means you will need to record voice tags before using the voice dialing feature. One nice thing about the voice dialing on the W300i is that you can use it in conjunction with hands free solutions including Bluetooth headsets.

The EDGE speed is decent for data on the W300i. The Access NetFront browser bundled with the phone enhances the web surfing experience. It’s speedy by WAP browser standards and provides tools such as saving an image from a web page to your image folder, dialing a number if you highlight a phone number on a web page and other options. It handles most WAP sites with ease, and even can load some HTML pages. Should you buy the unlocked version rather than the pre-configured Cingular model, you’ll need to enter your carrier’s settings for data, MMS and email. The set-up is easy enough since you can go to www.sonyericsson.com/support and enter your device model and phone number, and you will receive a text message on your phone that will walk you through the connection setting process. Manual configuration isn’t needed on the Cingular version and all the data connection settings will be pre-loaded.