Sony Ericsson W980 review

It's said that familiarity breeds contempt, but in the world of mobile phones we think it's more a case of better the devil you know.

While Nokia led the way in terms of sheer ease of use when mobiles first emerged, Sony Ericsson has since more than matched it, and so provides perhaps the most welcoming and intuitive traditional phone interface here.

So we're soon working our way through the brand new W980 Walkman phone's features. There's an impressive 8GB internal memory, matching the iPhone's capacity – it's a 3G phone, too – on to which you can load AAC, MP3 and WAV audio files plus MP4 and WMV video.

There's also a decent 3.2 megapixel camera here, complete with zoom. To add to the list of plus points, there is also an FM radio.

Shake it to shuffle it
A unique feature of this Walkman ‘clam' phone is the ‘shake control', which allows you to shuffle your tunes with a vigorous shake of the handset. Dare we say, gimmicks aside, despite Sony's ‘clear audio' claims, the Sony sounds fairly average – not least through the poor earphones.

We'd like a little more bottom end depth, while the level of detail and dynamics on display simply can't match the iPhone or indeed the Samsung offering.

Meanwhile the screen is fine but fairly small for video playback. A large capacity memory and idiot-proof usability are this phone's positives. Sadly, though, when it comes to sonic ability, it can't quite rise to the challenge of the best available here.