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The Sony Ericsson W508 walks and talks midrange though by no means does it keep a low profile. What we have here is the full Walkman package at a bargain price and the rest of the W508 specs may as well be irrelevant if music is the first thing on your list.

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A true Walkman at heart, the W508 takes after the Sony Ericsson W980 in many ways and even adds a dash of color to the Walkman experience – in fact, the StyleUp covers make it a regular chameleon.

There are eight StyleUp covers to choose from and the W508 always ships with a spare one in the box. And in case you wonder what’s with all those paintjobs, let’s not forget the W508 is in a twin predicament and has an identity to assert against the T707. That one we just reviewed, so we’re sort of in for a sequel, though in Walkman flavor this time.

سعر سونى اريكسون Sony Ericsson W508 Price
Sony Ericsson W508 official photos

Key features:

• Quad-band GSM and 3G with HSDPA support
• 3.15 megapixel camera
• 2.2″ 256K-color TFT display with 240 x 320 pixel resolution
• Secondary monochrome OLED external display
• Scratch-resistant surface for both displays
• Touch sensitive external music control keys
• Hot-swappable M2 card slot (up to 16 GB), 1 GB included
• Stereo Bluetooth (A2DP)
• Walkman music player with Shake control and SensMe
• FM radio with RDS
• Gesture control
• Accelerometer for screen rotation
• Basic multi-tasking support
• Smart dialing
• Threaded messaging
• Exchangeable StyleUp covers

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Main disadvantages

• Camera doesn’t have auto focus or LED flash
• Low-grade video recording (QVGA@15fps)
• No web browser screen auto rotate
• No document viewer

The Sony Ericsson W508 is a friendly phone that has many ways to interact with you – TrackID to find the track you’ve just overheard at the caf?, SensMe so you can pick songs based on your mood, Shake control to change tracks at the flick of the wrist plus touch-sensitive music buttons and even Gesture control to mute calls with a wave of your hand.

سعر سونى اريكسون Sony Ericsson W508 Price
Sony Ericsson W508 at ours

The proprietary audio jack and the single, lonely loudspeaker are points against W508 but support for 16 GB M2 cards and FM radio with RDS are guaranteed to keep you rocking from dusk till dawn.

3G goodies like video calls and HSDPA for high-speed browsing are here, complemented with the nice web browser. The lack of document viewer is a bit of a letdown but not really a feature a Walkman can’t do without.

So without further ado, the Sony Ericsson W508 is in for a proper hardware inspection. Join us on the next page, as we go through our checklist.

Fixed focus 3 megapixel camera is nothing new

The 3 megapixel snapper, like most things about this phone, is the same as in the Sony Ericsson T707. It shoots at a maximum resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels and has no autofocus or flash. Pictures are taken with the handset held in portrait mode, part of the display serving as the viewfinder. The center of the navigation key is the capture button.

The options include white balance, shot mode, geotagging and various color effects. You can capture panorama images by taking three consecutive shots using the dedicated shooting mode.

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The camera interface

The image quality is the same as it was in the T707 – significantly short of exceptional – the noise-suppression processing is pretty harsh on the details, giving the photos a watercolor painting effect.

However you’ve got to remember our W508 is a pre-release unit so the camera will most probably be tuned differently (better) in the final retail product.

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Camera samples

Again the video recording is limited to QVGA resolution at 15 frames per second – there are no surprises here. It’s like most of the Sony Ericsson handsets in this class and we won’t even bother publishing a sample.

Sweet and fluent browsing

Sony Ericsson W508 comes with the nice Access NetFront web browser v3.4 featuring the extended home screen, also available in the other recent Sony Ericsson handsets. Plenty of shortcuts arranged in a tree structure are listed on the homescreen right under a search and an address bar. The appearance of the home screen changes to various bright colors each time you start the browser too.

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The extended home screen is a nice touch on the latest Sony Ericsson phones

Elaborate web pages are rendered well and there are lots of configurable settings too. There is a full screen mode both in portrait and landscape view. Unfortunately, it must be switched manually because there is no auto-rotate capability. View modes include Text only, Pan and Zoom, and Zoom page. The panning/scrolling speed is up to standard.

The Sony Ericsson W508 web browser offers a virtual mouse pointer that is nice to work with. Another interesting and practical feature is the “Find on page” option.

Mid-range connectivity for a mid-range handset

The W508 scores highly on connectivity options. Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and 3G are all on board for worldwide roaming. HSDPA is also supported.

Besides the network-based connectivity, the Sony Ericsson W508 offers the usual Bluetooth v2.0 and USB options. There is also support for the A2DP profile allowing you to listen to music on a stereo Bluetooth headset. Last, but not least, there is also the M2 card slot, which is often one of the quickest ways of transferring data.

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The connectivity menu with the available USB modes

Typical organizer and familiar apps

The Sony Ericsson W508 offers a wide range of time-management features as is usual for its class. There is an Organizer icon in the main menu and it contains several applications: File manager ,Java Applications, Video call, Calendar, Tasks, Notes, Synchronization, Timer, Stopwatch, Calculator, and Code memo.

The Calendar offers monthly, weekly and daily views. When you add a birth date in the phonebook, the phone prompts you to add it to the calendar. Tasks can be of two types: simple Tasks and Phone calls. Notes are written similar to messages and the T9 dictionary can be used here as well.

The Alarms application hardly needs any introduction. There are five alarm slots available. Each one offers a lot of options – you can choose to repeat the alarm on chosen days of the week or everyday.

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Calendar • Alarms

As for the additional applications, Sony Ericsson W508 comes with AccuWeather, Music Mate 5, Music Quiz and Walk Mate, all well known from the Walkman series. The last app can be used as wallpaper.

Available for free download and compatible with a variety of mobile OS and Java-enabled handsets, Google Maps for Mobile come preinstalled on the Sony Ericsson W508.

After defining a start and end location, the possible routes are calculated with overall guidance based on the available information in the database.

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Two different view modes are available – Satellite and Map view and the user interface is clean and intuitive. Traffic information is another important feature here.
The Map view is very informative • zooming in a street • satellite view

Sony Ericsson W508 packs three preinstalled games. All of them are old and known: Bowling, Guitar Rock Tour, and FMX III.
The three preinstalled games: Bowling, Guitar Rock Tour, and FMX III

Final words

The Sony Ericsson W508 is the first Walkman flip since the Sony Ericsson W980 and the two have a lot in common. It’s sure welcome that the new Walkman midranger almost matches the specs of the high-end W980 that was released almost a year ago.

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Sony Ericsson W980

While the W508 doesn’t have the roomy 8 GB internal storage of its spiritual forefather, it supports M2 cards of up to 16 GB, giving it even more storage potential as the W980 doesn’t even have a card slot.

The FM transmitter is missing (it’s still a strictly high-end feature), there are no stereo speakers and the external display is monochrome, but the W508 has a much more attractive price tag.

Online stores are currently accepting pre-orders for W508 at under 130 euro (180 US dollars) and the price will probably drop even further once the handset becomes available.

But the story of W508 won’t be complete without its T-series twin. The Sony Ericsson T707, which we recently reviewed, is similarly spec’d but trades the Walkman moniker for a slight design edge. The T707 omits an accelerometer and the Walkman goodies but has some really cool light effects. Other than that, the two are pretty much identical in terms of hardware.

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Sony Ericsson T707

Basically, you shouldn’t have any second thoughts about these two mainstream phones, as Sony Ericsson have come up with two rather capable mid-rangers in their ranks. However, the way we see it, the concept of an affordable style-driven phone (T707) is somewhat questionable. But an affordable music phone – which gets the real high-end Walkman treatment (W508) – sounds just right.

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Design and construction (continued)

The front of the device is where this phone makes a play for a place in your pocket. It was clearly inspired by Sony Ericsson’s Walkman former flagship, the W980, and houses three touch-operated controls for the music player, the external display and the camera.

The three keys are a play/pause key and skip forward and backward keys that also work for seeking. The icons on the keys are backlit. Here’s also where the side lock slider comes into play – it locks the touch keys to prevent accidental presses.

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Touch-sensitive keys are always a nice parlor trick

The secondary display is a low-resolution monochrome one but offers plenty of information – time, battery charge, signal strength and network type, as well as song info during playback. Its legibility under sunlight is disappointing, partly because of the glossy plastic covering it – when the display is off, it almost blends in with it.

The camera is a 3.15 megapixels no-thrills fixed focus unit. There’s also a small LED beside the cameras but that’s mostly for assisting gesture control in the dark. It’s so feeble it’s next to useless as a video light (it’s not supposed to work as a camera flash at all).

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The LED is next to useless as a video light

The front plastic generally looks cheap with the color appearing to be printed on. There’s a good reason for the latter – Sony Ericsson W508 can be quite colorful with a little help from the StyleUp covers available for it. Whether it’s Sunny Orange, Forest Green, Architectural Purple, Mysterious Graffiti, Midnight Summer, Splashed Art, Radial Blue or Street Hip-hop, they all bring a little color to the generic sounding Metal Grey and Poetic White color schemes.
There’s no shortage of color variations here

The back of the device is home to the Sony Ericsson and Walkman logos. The Sony Ericsson logo as usual is raised, making the device wobbly on an even surface. At the bottom is the single loudspeaker.

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The Sony Ericsson logo and the Walkman badge of honor

Under the pry-to-open battery cover is a Li-Ion battery as well as the SIM and M2 card slots. The battery is quoted at 400 hours of standby. The M2 card slot supports capacities of up to 16GB. The back cover is made of thin plastic and because you have to force it in and out, frequent opening will certainly reduce its lifespan.
The battery is a BST-39 unit, same as the one on T707 and W910

The Sony Ericsson W508 is a solid device with no creaks. The choice of a monochrome secondary display was a good one – it’s not overloaded with features and it gives the handset a bit of an old school look.

The touch-sensitive keys are a nice touch as well, no pun intended. They don’t break up the front panel making it easier for Sony Ericsson to splash on a lot of color, without having to go around physical buttons.

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Sony Ericsson W508 in hand

User interface: nothing new under the sun

The W508 interface is the regular Sony Ericsson feature phone UI and it is still used in most of their top handsets.

The standby screen is arranged in the usual manner with information on top indicating signal strength, currently used data carrier and battery status. At the bottom of the display just above the context keys are their labels.

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The well-known Sony Ericsson home screen

The options for the menu layout are the standard foursome – theme-dependent, 3 x 4 grid of icons, rotating view and single icon view. There’s nothing that we haven’t seen before. But if you’re new to Sony Ericsson’s latest devices, our in-depth review of Sony Ericsson C903 is a pretty up-to-date reference.

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The standard menu layout

The well-known Activity menu offers quick access to a user-defined list of favorite features, web, recent events and, of course, the Running Apps tab that takes care of multitasking.
The well-known Activity menu

Flight mode can only work with a SIM card in the device and requires a restart.

The interface is visually appealing and snappy. Unlike the Sony Ericsson T707, the W508 features an inbuilt accelerometer so auto rotation is enabled in the Media Center.

The Sony Ericsson W508 supports Flash Lite themes, which change the color scheme and wallpaper. Our handset has 2 themes preinstalled: Clarity and Kaleidoscope black.

The nice thing about Flash themes is that they can be dynamic. We’ve seen various implementations with Sony Ericsson phones – for example the themes on the W508 change their color according to the time of day. We’ve also seen Sony Ericsson Flash themes that display new artwork on selected days such as international public holidays.

When the Kaleidoscope black theme is activated on the home screen a Walkman logo appears surrounded by many colorful patterns. Thanks to the accelerometer the logo rotates when the device is turned.

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The two preinstalled themes: Clarity and Kaleidoscope black

As before, you can also use an application as a background instead of an actual image.