Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

I borrowed a W810i so I can as well write a short note about it.

It's got a standard candybar design, and as such is very much like previous models. As it's a Walkman-branded phone it has a special button for the media player and a sizeable amount of memory (shipped with 512 MB).

The camera is nice with a well-working and fast auto-focus.

Considering it's a media-optimised phone I was disappointed by the media player that wasn't intuitive. I would have liked to start with the list of media, not the player window.

The numeric keys are excellent. Some of the most tactile keys I've encountered in a long time. They are also all the same size. Far too many phones stray away from that "UI design 101" rule.

Where the good design ends is with the control buttons: Keys are combined and are a bit too close to each other, so I often pressed the Walkman button when I wanted soft key 1. By combining e.g. soft key 1 and back on a small key also means it's very hard to press. What I also didn't like was that it has a joystick that only acts vertically plus an arrow "ring", instead of the much preferred joystick with arrow function. I saw that some other new phone models have a real joystick, so I'm wondering why they switch back and forth this way.

When will phones ship with an analogue joystick? That would make phone use more intuitive (press more to increase menu and web page scrolling speed etc). It would also be excellent for games.

A good solid phone no doubt, and with the black casing also good-looking, but as noted some issues in the UI department.

Overview - - Mobile phone - Sony Ericsson W810i�-�