Sony Ericsson W380i - Continued

Another peculiar feature is the gesture control, which is sadly very basic and not quite as cool as it sounds. It allows you to wave your hand in front of the top of the phone when it's closed to mute an incoming call or an alarm. It didn't work that well on the review sample, but it's at least a novel attempt to add a new feature. If it worked a little bit better and did a bit more, it might actually have been a cool feature, but as it is, it's just something you can use to show off in front of your mates if that's the kind of person you are.

The number one most disappointing thing with the W380i has to be the rear battery cover, as it's really flimsy and it takes quite a lot of force to remove it; it looks like it's not going to be too hard to snap the little plastic lips that hold it in place. Behind the battery cover is the M2 memory slot which can be accessed without removing the battery, as well as the SIM card slot and the battery itself. According to Sony Ericsson, the battery should be good for some 7h of talk time or 300h of standby, although our early sample seemed to suck quite a lot of power. If you use the W380i as your MP3 player we wouldn't expect that you'd get much more than a day's usage out of the battery.

At 92 x 49 x 16 mm (HxWxD) closed, the W380i is very pocket friendly, although it's not super light at 100g. When you power on the W380i you get the option to choose between powering it on as normal or setting it in flight mode which might be handy if you want to listen to your music while on an airplane. The menu system is pretty much like any other Sony Ericsson phone, so it really comes down to how fond you are of the way their phones work as to whether or not you'll like the W380i.

The Walkman player is quite easy to use, but it's also quite basic, though it does at least have Sony's MegaBass for enhancing the sound if you listen to bass heavy tracks. It also has a built in feature called TrackID which allows you to record a short part of a song you hear and then it'll connect to a database and let you know what song it is. We're not sure how well this works and if it's country limited or not, but it could be an interesting feature if you hear a song that you like but you don't know what it is.

The downside is that this handset is not 3G, so you'll have to send that data via GPRS or EDGE. It's at least a quad band handset and works with the 850, 900, 1800 and 1900MHz GSM frequencies, which means that you can use it in most of the world with the possible exception being Japan.

Overall the W380i might not be the most exciting handset ever, but the touch sensitive playback buttons and the hidden LCD display are some novel features that set it apart from the crowd. Our review sample was a rather ghastly purple with pinkish buttons, but it will also be available in a more subtle black or grey colour scheme which we think will make it look quite a lot better. Overall this looks like a pretty decent handset if you're looking for a phone that can double up as a decent MP3 player, but don't care much about the camera functionality. It's also rather good for making calls on, but if it wasn't we would've told you that a lot earlier.

We'd like to apologize for using stock shots, but the pre-production sample we had wasn't suitable for photography due to it having prototype markings and stickers on it.