Sony Ericsson W518a Walkman (AT&T): First Look

[ Music ] ^M00:00:04 [ Background music ] >> Kent German: Hi, I'm Kent German Senior Editor here at CNET.com. Today we're going to take a first look at the Sony Ericsson W518A. This is a new phone for AT&T service. This is a walkman phone it's where we get the W in front of the number. It looks a lot like the W980 which is an unlocked phone we saw last year. A few differences but same basic design. Black color, very thin profile, a few circular music controls down below. External display is a bit smaller, it's not full color, it's only monochrome. It's a 3.2 megapixel camera, not as high as some of the Sony Ericsson Cybershot phones but not a bad camera in its own right though. The music controls right here, they do not overlap as they did on the W980 but they are still circular, still pretty slick. Touch controls if you just tap it like you can start the music player and then you can cycle through songs. Inside internal display is pretty bright and vibrant. Colors look great, graphics and photos they all looked really great. Navigation controls and keypad, not the best thing unfortunately Sony Ericsson fell back into its old habits when designing these, had a reputation for trying to be a little over stylized and really forsaking usability. Definitely the case here; had a little trouble navigating through menus. Really in terms of keypad this phone isn't the best. Inside you'll find the walkman player, AT&T navigator support with GPS, Bluetooth, a personal organizer, a speaker phone. The phone is 3G so it supports cellular video and AT&T Mobile Music. So a lot going on here however, the phone is kind of sluggish internally. Opening menus seemed to be a little bit of a lag especially opening applications. Also the phone froze on a couple of occasions. Call quality was fine, not great. Felt that the volume could be a bit louder and there was a bit of an audio hiss during conversations; wasn't completely distracting but wasn't the best either so the story with this phone is really test it out before buying. Test those navigation controls and keypad [background music] and make sure they're comfortable and test that call quality make sure you can deal with it. I'm Kent German and this is the Sony Ericson W518A. ^M00:01:55 [ Music ]