Picking up where the W800i left off, the Sony Ericsson W810i offers improved music navigation in tandem with the same excellent music management capabilities and decent amount of bundled memory as its predecessor. Out-of-box audio quality is on par with the high standards we've come to except from the handset maker, while we’re slightly disappointed by the lack of stereo Bluetooth audio. These niggles aside, the W810i makes for a stellar music phone with side servings of a 2-megapixel camera and EDGE.

At 100 x 46 x 20 mm and 99 g, it's a near exact match for its compact predecessor, yet its glossy black finish dots the i on improvements including a total rework of its music controls.

W810i screen measures 176 x 220 pixels, and the default theme is a bright complementary orange.
The rich, vibrant display supports 262,144 colors and measures 1.8 inches diagonally (176x220 pixels). It's fantastic for scrolling through the menus, viewing pictures and videos, and playing games, but it's harder to see in direct light, and it goes completely dark when the backlighting is off. Unfortunately, you can't change the backlighting time or the text size.

Sony Ericsson W810i is equipped with integrated 2 mega-pixel camera with autofocus, 4x digital zoom and picture light. Capture special and unforgettable moments in your mobile phone. With editing option, you can show your artistic talent and manipulate images as per your wish. You can share it with your friends and family via Multimedia Messaging Service.

Standard battery, Li-Po 900 mAh (BST-37)
Stand-by Up to 350 h
Talk time Up to 8 h

Unfortunately, its properties are a little bit different from the properties of the SE W800 battery. The music player, being the most energy-consuming application in the phone, brings down battery durability to less than two days, which is far too short for a music phone. According to the manufacturer's official statements, Sony Ericsson W810 is able to offer a stand-by time of 350 hours or a total of 480 minutes of call time. Nevertheless, bear in mind that intensive usage is likely to shrink the charging cycles to as much as a half of the above mentioned times.

music is the focus of the W810i as it’s billed as one of the Walkman phones. Sony Ericsson made a strong effort to provide the best possible hardware and software possible at this price point. Like the W600i, the W810i has a dedicated hardware button to launch the music player. You can find the button easily on the left circular nav pad which is the only button in orange on the W810i. The music player has some basic features such as playlists, information about the selected track, turn on shuffle or loop and play with the equalizer. The Sony Ericsson has a bass enhancement feature called Mega Bass, and when it’s turned on, it will boost the bass volume above all other channels. How does the music sound via the built-in loudspeakers and via the stereo headphones? Not bad for a phone, but not as good as the audio quality on the iPod. The audio coming out of the speakers has good volume and decent sound. It’s great for conference calls and playing music if you don’t have a pair of stereo headset or external speakers.The audio via the included Sony Ericsson stereo earbud headphones is good by phone standards. If you mainly play rock and pop music, you will like what you hear via the headset (Candlebox sounded quite good to me). If you are into classical music, you will notice the sound via the headphones is as full and smooth on both the high instruments and the deeper brass, though Dvorak’s Symphony 9 in E Minor sounded better on the iPod nano. And that’s not the headphones’ fault either. We use the W810i earbuds on the iPod, and the headphones beats out the Sony MDR-EX71 earbuds, offering with much fuller sound. You can also play music on portable speakers using the optional phone-to-stereo cables and portable speakers sold separately.

Ripping music and transferring tracks to the W810i is part of the fun experience with this phone. The W810i supports MP3, MP4, AAC, AMR, MIDI, IMY, EMY and WAV (16 kHz max sample rate) and 3gpp streaming files. The Sony Ericsson comes with Disc2Phone software and USB cable which allow you to rip tracks from music CDs and transfer them to the phone via the cable. Very fast and simple.

Other audio features include a built-in FM radio, flight mode for playing music only without turning on the phone, MusicDJ for create your own ringtones, purchasing music and ringtones from Sony Ericsson’s web site and more.

For video playback, the Sony Ericsson supports MPEG4 and 3gp videos and comes with VideoDJ which is a video editing tool that allows you to add sound tracks and insert other clips to current videos that are ported to the phone or taken by the phone’s camera.

One downside is the storage capabilities of the W810i - just 20MB of onboard memory, which has to be shared between tunes, photos and any other file you have stored on it. Fortunately it comes equipped with room for a Memory Stick, enabling you to add up to 4GB of extra storage, which should be plenty for even the largest music library.

The Sony Ericsson W810i is a quad band GSM world phone that operates on 850/900/1800/1900MHz bands and will work anywhere in the world GSM networks are available. For data the W810i has EDGE and GPRS support.