The supplied earphones are better than the average sort you find boxed with mobile phones. They do a pretty good job, particularly for a phone at this price level, with plenty of bass punch too.

The loudspeaker on the phone, on the other hand, is tinny and bass-light, so will do your music no favours.

Adding higher quality headphones is an easy option, thanks to the two-piece headset supplied, which has a standard 3.5mm socket for plugging in your own cans.

This is recommended if you want to enjoy the full audio delights of the Walkman player – through our Sennheiser reference headphones, music playback sounded very pleasing indeed .

Easy to use Walkman

Operating the Walkman player is an easy ride too. It has a straightforward, intuitive user interface, and the outside flip controls – which enable you to fast forward or rewind through tracks, pause/play songs, or scroll up and down lists – work efficiently.

Haptic feedback lets you know buttons have been properly pressed with a small vibration, while a small Walkman button on the side toggles you back to Walkman menu options when the flip is closed.

There's a neat slider button on top, too, to stop accidental pressing. In fact, you'll rarely need to open the phone while you're listening to music.

Uploading music to your phone

Tracks can be loaded up on to the phone from a PC using supplied Sony Ericsson Media Manager software and USB cable, or by dragging and dropping files with the phone in mass storage mode.

Phone storage is a measly 14MB, but a 512MB Memory Stick Micro card is included in-box to give you room for more than 450 tracks.

Sony Ericsson's nifty TrackID music identification software is also included, so you can quickly identify tunes you hear around you, or on the FM radio that's built into the phone.

Camera quality

Unlike the Walkman player, the camera is a pretty basic effort. Its 1.3-megapixel maximum resolution is entry-level stuff for a UK cameraphone in 2008.

Controls are limited, there's no flash or autofocus system, though there are the usual standard effects, white balance options and so on.

Quality isn't great though. In decent light, image quality is relatively poor, with a lack of detail and softness in shots; low light snaps are worse. It's essentially a camera for quick snaps, picture messages, and so on, but don't expect good quality prints.

Sony Ericsson's now-standard option to upload images straight to a Blogger account is offered too, though there's no facility for shooting even basic quality video footage on this camera.

It can play back video clips in certain formats copied to the phone or downloaded over the air (though GPRS/EDGE speed downloading is slow).

Web browsing features

The W350i has an Access NetFront web browser embedded, which provides a way of checking out websites.

Its opening screen has a Google search option, which is handy, though browsing the full internet isn't as satisfactory as faster, more capable Sony Ericsson handsets.

In default mode, web pages are optimised for the mobile screen, and there's a Smart-Fit option for small screen scrolling, but trying to view full web pages in their natural state can be slow and frustrating.

Mobile internet-optimised pages, including operator portals and Sony Ericsson's Play Now download site, however, render speedily.

RSS feeds are supported too, so you can view updates from favourite websites or blogs more easily and speedily.

Additional tools

Sony Ericsson has packed the W350i with a standard kit of organiser tools – calendar, tasks, notes, alarms, timer, stopwatch, calculator and code memo – plus there's a convertor app and voice recorder facility.

Another Walkman standard, the Music Mate guitar and piano chord guide app, is pre-loaded too, plus three games are included.

Impressive performance

Voice calls made and taken on the W350i were clear and fine, with no problems with reception.