Posted by strizlow800
Sony Ericsson W800i Walkman phone compared to the Alcatel's Music Touch phone S853.
When Sony Ericsson released the Walkman series phones, the entire music began to live a different life of it's own. Then other manufacturers tried to make a true competitors to SE Walkman series phones by designing their own music phone models, but the question is: Has anyone already made better music phone than the Walkman Sony Ericsson's series?
In this review the main theme is about the sound quality of these two phone models most common from these maufacturers. So everyone will ask itself why I chose exactly that Alcatel which is not that good phone at it's overall performace compared to the W800, but the sound it make is not that bad. When compared the overall features, the winner is the W800 which is better in many of them. See yourself:
- 2 Mpixel camera - 1.3 Mpixel camera on the S853.
- 2 LED Flash - The S853 has no flash.
- W800 has bigger memory card capacity support instead of the S853 one which is limited on up to 1GB only.
- S853 is missing the bluetooth file transfer support, insted of the W800 fully functional bluetooth, and etc...
- The only thing that the S853 has and W800 hasn't is the EDGE.
But the battle is getting harder when the question is the sound quality.
Alcatel S853 Sound Quality Overview:
- The S853 is named as a "Alcatel Music Touch" phone which is something similar to the Walkman brand of Sony Ericsson (excluding the fact that the Walkman brand is well known all over the world before the Walkman phones too). S853 has great sound system named as 2.1 Stereo Surround system. I've tested the Alcatel S853 so I could say that the sound quality is very good on the speakers. It has fully functional MP3/AAC player which supports most various formats like: MP3, MP4, M4A, AAC, AAC+ and etc... The sound that the speakers make (2 tweeters and 1 bass) is excellent and it could be set up as you like. You can turn on the right, or the left speaker, enhance or decrease the bass and etc... with the built in equalizer. The S853 definately beats the W800 when the songs are listened through the speaker(s) because it sounds like a real mini Hi Fi. The main disadvantages of the S853 are:
- the small memory card capacity limitation up to only 1 GB,
- the long time to load the songs from the memory card (MiniSD), so if you put a 512MB card full with songs it takes about 10 - 15 seconds to power on the MP3 player and the phone ofter freezes.
The sound quality through the headphones is excellent, but not that good with the factory headphones. I've tested this phone with it's default headset and used the W800 factory headset which makes more reliable sound. Other disadvantage of the S853 is the songs bitrate. The 256Kbit songs sound same as the 128 ones when listened through the headset, so this gives the W800 a step forward in front of this phone.
- Sony Ericsson W800 Walkman Review:
The W800 is branded Sony Ericsson Walkman phone made mainly for music, which main cell is to make the use of the mobile phones more popular than using the CDs and other music players. The W800 has built in high quality MP3/AAC and Video player, named as Walkman. It is the same Media player from the SE K750 phone, but has added some extra features like the orange colour theme which is traditional for Sony Ericsson Walkman series and the most important MegaBass Equalizer option which boosts the bass of the phone's sound output. Actually W800's speaker is mono and the mono and stereo sounds sound the same and they are crappy at higher volume. But the headset is the strong side of the W800's sound system. It's media player can be accessed directly from the Walkman button right above the joystick. It has four different modes of working: Artists, Tracks, Playlists and Videos option which make browsing the files in the memory very fast. Accessing the memory stick is not problem as it was in the S853. When you need your files stored in your memory stick, you can get them instantly without waiting. You can also create a playlist of your favourite songs and sort them.
The W800's heandset is very good quality and it does not give crappy sound even if the MegaBass option is turned on in the equalizer. The equalizer can be adjusted automatically by chosing some of the predefined sound setups as: Treble boost, bass boost, voice or it can be set up manually by adjusting it's parameters untill you get the sound you want. This option was excluded in the S853.
At the end, both music phones are great but according to their prices they are from different class but if someone want the phone only for music it could be very difficult to decide because there are feature that one of the phones has and the others hasn't which confuses the customers who are chosing their new music phone. But in my opinion, everyone should go for the W800 because it is a brand Sony Ericsson Walkman phone and the Alcatel still has less features and it's full of bugs. So what's your opinion which one is better for music W800 or the S853?
strizlow800
Posted by rrojas260
Excellent reviews, I still prefer Walkman among other brand but i think that Acatel is on the right path
Posted by strizlow800
@rrojas260
Thanks a lot for replying.