Sony Ericsson W880i $888 (without subscription) Available from phone retailers
With a girth of 9.4mm, or just a few credit cards stacked together, Sony Ericsson's latest Walkman phone is one of the slimmest phones out there, and the sexiest as well.
The W880i also has 3G thrown in, together with Sony Ericsson's useful Walkman software that plays back songs on the phone.
Unfortunately, the biggest problem with an otherwise impressive gadget is the impossibly small and slippery buttons which make an SMS message so hard to compose.
But more on that later.
First, the cool stuff.
Going by the look on my friends' faces when I placed the phone on the table, the immediate reactions were often 'wow', 'so slim'.
When it comes to touch and feel, Sony Ericsson clearly knows what turns people on. The brushed metal look at the front and smooth back of the phone make it nice to hold.
But the star feature here is the Walkman features, which make this gadget something of an iPod nano with 3G thrown in. The bundled software, also available on other Walkman phones, lets you transfer songs from your PC to the phone easily.
The software player on the phone is a joy to use as well.
If your songs come with data like singer, song title and album art, the phone displays them neatly on-screen.
To skip songs, just push the directional pad left or right.
There are even 'visualisations' - those swirling patterns you get on the PC when playing a song on Windows Media Player - if you like such frills.
Unlike other phones with rudimentary software players, music is clearly not an afterthought on this Walkman gizmo.
The same can be said about its bundled earphones. Though still a far cry from the $150 Shure earphones, these out-of-the-box models are better than most of the earphones that come with a cellphone.
And if you prefer your existing earphones, just plug them into an adapter that hooks up to the phone's data port.
The W880i also comes with a 1GB M2 memory card that slots into its side.
The good news is, the phone supports 2GB and (upcoming) 4GB cards as well, so you can have thousands of songs on the go.
Basically, there's nothing wrong with the main selling points of Sony Ericsson's new gizmo.
The music's clear, the screen is ultra-sharp (check out the clean edges of fonts on-screen) and the 2-megapixel camera is competent (as usual, more for brightly-lit rooms).
But the big letdown is the small, hard-to-use buttons on the number pad. Almost every person that I passed the phone to - about a dozen of them - said they found it hard to press the right buttons.
For me, this phone was never made for my fat fingers.
In the first week of testing it, I ended up thumbing so many wrong buttons that my SMS messages took possibly twice the time I usually needed.
Sure, there are ways around this, like by resorting to your fingernails. But that seems like an unnecessary hassle.
Seeing the space that Sony Ericsson had on the keypad, there is no reason - other than pleasing a designer's whim - to come up with such awfully small buttons.
Final Say
An excellent music phone marred by impossibly tiny buttons. Good if you want an iPod nano and a phone rolled in one. But make sure you test out - and can live with - the buttons.
