SonyEricsson W850i Black On Vodafone Pay As You Go

Its easy to be seduced by this phone as it looks attractive and promises a lot (phone, picture messages, video messages, quality camera, walkman, and various others). However I have been severely disappointed with it and was close to throwing it in the Thames earlier today. Lets first discuss the basics.1. Call quality: worse than my previous phone but manageable.2. Texting: more cumbersome than my previous phone e.g. trying to write the common word 'will' always present the word 'wilk' as a first option! Additionally the phone is weighted so that the centre of gravity is above the index finger, the result is the phone is constantly falling away from you, this ergonomic fault drives me nuts.3. Camera: 2 mega pixels sounds impressive but unless your subject is dead or asleep the image will blur, a photo of someone walking past will look artistically blurred, someone dancing will look like the camera was dipped in Vaseline.4. Walkman. Music quality is ok, user interface is a bit slow to navigate. If your anything other than a casual music listener (and if you are your not going to go to the effort to put music on this phone) you will be better of buying an iPod. The software that is provided to transfer music is slow and unintuitive, for example there is no obvious way of searching for music on the PC the phone is connected to.5. The software for calendar is rubbish, you can not view your calendar events in a list. As another owner said the only indicator that an event is on a day is the fact that the date is in bold, which is not clear.6. The battery dies quick. This is simply a feature of having a big bright colour screen, but I will learn from my experience in the future and get something with a simpler screen.7. The phone is bulky, it looks great in a shop but rubbish as a great big lump in your pocket.Others: These are features that may be due to a faulty handset or user error, so may be isolated to my handset:Software jams a lot. Seven times so far (in two months), this means the battery has to come out and the phone restarted.When the front panel is slide upwards often the caller can only hear what your saying intermittently, this is a common problem with phones with moving (especially sliding) parts.The software for connecting the phone for file share does not appear to work, the phone is simply not recognized when the USB cable is inserted. This may be because the software is not intuitive and I am not using it properly or it may be a fault, either way it is not fit for purpose.It may well be because the service is not set up correctly but despite having an expensive contract I have not been able to send picture messages.Summary:Every feature the phone has it delivers in sub-par performance. The phone build is poor, the voice quality average, the software poor, the camera, not usable in a social way, the Walkman will annoy you. The W850i promises a lot but you'll wish you bought a simple phone, iPod Nano and a digital camera, those will actually work. Don't be seduced.

I used to have an all singing and all dancing Experia X10 but after a year it went wrong and i had too chuck it. I decided that my next phone was gonna be an old style Sony Ericsson and i decided to go with the 850i. First thing i noticed was how heavy it was and that feeled me with a lot of confidence cos to me it meant it was well made. I have had it now for over 5 months and it has already proven its worth to me and as not yet let me down , not like my old one before this. It is easy to use and easy to manage with the instructions being self explanatory. The reason i have only gave it four stars instead of 5 is i have big fingers and i do find it hard to text fast on this keypad as i do hit 2 keys at once on more than one occasion.

I've owned a sharp gx30 for the last 3 years, and never had a problem with it until the end when the battery failed on me. However it started to look a little dodgy so I decided to go for a new phone.I fancied this one straight away (in black) but a few of the reviews put me off. In the end I decided to go for it, and am so glad that I did! I don't find it fiddly or annoying. The memory is brilliant, the battery life is brilliant, the camera is brilliant, the lay-out is perfect and all the controls are easy to use. I can't think of a better phone to follow my gx30!

I have a Sony Ericson w850i. Mine is not on Vodafone, it's on another network and they have been fine, so I won't mention them. The phone, however, I can not recommend.The Good:The camera seems to be very good quality, and the functions useful and accessible.The screen is quite big, and certainly clear.It has a torch, which is much more useful than you might think.The buttons on the keypad are positive.The Bad:The buttons on the navigate pad are awkward, and you often catch the MP3 button.The Menu systems are inconsistent, misleading, and clumsily arranged. For example, when you've finished a call its all too easy to open the browser, because the 'End Call' button becomes the 'Browser' button just as you go to press it. This may seem a small thing, but it is this lack of skill by the designers that is repeated all over the phone, and leads to repeated minor annoyance.Example: When unlocking the keypad, sometimes it requires two buttons pressed, but in one mode it only requires one. A small thing? Yes, but that second button has just turned into the browser button, so every now and then you will accidentally open the browser. Also, the two buttons used to unlock are the easiest to press when the phone is in your pocket, and mine has twice tried to videocall my home when it should have been locked in my pocket. You can set it to lock when you shut the phone, but it still unlocks if you push the buttons!Example: Delete is never available when you want it.Example: The Help (called 'Info') states the obvious most of the time, and is not there at other times.Example: When you use a file command like 'Add' it looks like it is going to apply to the selected item, but it applies to the whole list without warning.Example: This one is really annoying... Usually you either start with the object (say a file) and apply the function (say delete), or the other way around. But this phone does it different ways for different things, which doesn't make for ease of use.Example: There are two buttons for starting the browser, plus a menu option and a short cut. The browser leads to soft porn mags mostly. I don't care how 'naughty' Melissa is, if I wanted porn I would chose it myself, thank you.Useless Things: You can do all sorts of useless things, like compose tinny music, make a photo look like it is a painting, or make a picture appear for a second while the phone starts, but you cant do something useful like set how long the screen stays on for. Nor can you set it to stay on until you want if off. So if you pause to compose a text, you will for ever have to press a button and wait while it shows you the time (why?) before the screen comes back.Short Cuts. You can set short cuts and put them on the spare buttons (the ones that aren't set to Browser). This would be good, but the phone resets them if you turn it off. So it is almost useless.The Mp3 Player. It sounds fine. It looks good. But it isn't consistent about using Tag3 information. I'm not sure but it might down load info about albums or something. It mixes tracks from albums sometimes when it thinks it knows better than you. So if your mate's band has a track called 'Tick' you may find it now belongs to The Yeah Yeah Yeahs (my mate should take that as a compliment, though) I really can't believe that it did that, and haven't been able to work out why it did.If you try to view the current playlist it will continuously cover it with the current track info, so you spend most of your time making it go back to what you actually want. This sort of problem is all over the phone.The software that comes with the phone is appauling. firstly I can't remove its icon from my desk top. But worse than that it knows what I want better than I do! And worst of all it seemed to fail to complete a USB transfer which left the phone continuously resetting. I spoke to customer services who told me to send it back to them. But managed to fix it by connecting it to a computer without the software, as a standard mass storage device, and resetting it manualy.There is no proper way to edit the phone book, either. The phone likes Outlook by Microsoft, and I even let them talk, but soon changed my mind. However, you can back the file up to the mem card and edit it with Notepad in XP by USB.The calendar function is useless. A day with an engagement is shown in bold, but bold isn't really different to normal so you can't tell.You have to use a special cable. For everything. I thought this would be ok before I bought the phone, But It Is Not Ok.Sometimes (if picked from a 'recent list') when you text, you can't tell which number you are sending to. So if someone has more than one number..there is more ( the profiles are badly done, and the icons aren't explained or deferentiated well, and ...) but I'm too tired to go on.PUT IT THIS WAY: I haven't bothered to set it up for email because I don't think it will be worth it. I am tied in to a contract, but if I can ditch the phone I will.The Ugly:There is nothing ugly about this phone. It looks really good all round.