A budget music phone with a Walkman music player, memory card slot, FM radio, Bluetooth and a basic camera. But despite its low price, we feel that the W395 offers poor value for money, and we don’t recommend this phone

Like too many Sony Ericsson’s of late, the W395 looks good on paper only. Let’s be a little more generous: it looks good when you get it out of the box too. But once you charge it up and switch it on: that’s when the problems begin.

The W395 is a budget Walkman phone in a slide design. It’s an average size and weight and comes in a choice of Black, Grey or Titanium. The Walkman controls are useful and light up in a funky way when in use. The keys aren’t the best though and we found the slide to be a bit wobbly, although not so wobbly that we expect it to fall off. The screen is average for a budget phone and does the job. The 2 megapixel camera is average too – average for an entry-level phone that is – in other words, not up to much.

But it’s a Walkman phone, so let’s look at the music functions next. On paper, everything is fine, with a music player, FM radio with RDS and stereo speakers. But again, once you try it out, that’s when the problems start. We found the Walkman software to be quite buggy. The menus were slow and have a tendency to freeze. Some MP3 tracks wouldn’t play, even though they play on other phones. No PC suite is available for synching phone with computer. And to top it off, the memory available is very poor indeed, at just 10 MB of built-in user memory. That’s enough to store about two music tracks! So, for a Walkman phone, this is really a flop.

There are far better phones available in the sub-£100 price range. Examples are the Samsung Tocco Lite, the LG Cookie, the Nokia 5310 Xpressmusic, and the Samsung G600.

Features of the Sony Ericsson W395 include:

* 2 megapixel camera with 2.5x digital zoom
* Video camera
* Display: TFT, 262,144-colours, 176 x 220 pixels (2 inches)
* Stereo music player
* FM Radio with RDS
* Integrated handsfree stereo speakers
* MP3/AAC ringtones
* Sound recorder
* Messaging: SMS, MMS, email
* 3D Java games with motion sensor
* Personal organiser functions
* Memory: 10 Mbytes plus Memory Stick Micro™ support (up to 4GB)
* Connectivity: Bluetooth, USB mass storage
* Flight mode
* GPRS, EDGE, web browser
* Vibrating alert
* Quadband
* Size: 96 x 47 x 15 mm
* Weight: 96g
* Talktime: up to 8 hours
* Battery standby: up to 480 hours