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The newest Walkman phone in the range of Sony Ericsson mobile phones is, like its predecessor, the W580, intended as a music phone; that’s its whole reason for existing. It’s an improvement on the old model, adding 3.5G into the mix, making uploading and downloading decidedly faster.

In many ways, however, it’s not a great improvement on the W580. As before, the Walkman button transports the user to the music manager, which is a good, clean interface that’s easy to use. The screen itself is exceptionally bright and sharp, and the audio quality is everything that Sony Ericsson aims to deliver.

A 2GB M2 card comes with the phone for content, but, really, it needs to be much larger; anyone truly serious about music is going to want more storage than that. Also why, oh why, didn’t the company build in a 3.5mm headphone jack? Instead you need to use the proprietary jack that’s supplied, and even if it does allow two pairs of headphones to be plugged in to share music, it’s still not good enough.

The camera is adequate, but without autofocus or flash, it lacks two important items. That said, web browsing is very fast, given the HSDPA, and it’s very simple and quick to upload videos.

Ultimately, the Sony Ericsson just doesn’t quite cut the mustard as a fully-fledged music phone. There are better Sony Ericsson mobile phone offerings in this field. Really, this is a phone on which you can play a few tunes and take a few pictures – a mobile phone with some extras – and nothing more.