Whoa! What have Sony Ericsson been up to? They’ve put their top-selling Walkman phone on a crash diet, given it a stainless steel casing and bundled in a 1 Gbyte memory card and a stereo headset. The Sony Ericsson W880i is a stunning phone that is a contender for the best Walkman phone so far. It’s also the thinnest and lightest 3G phone released in the UK (just 9.4 mm thick and 71g in weight). Yet it’s an incredibly well featured music phone. This phone is surely destined to be a winner!

If you want a multimedia powerhouse, you might be disappointed by the slow Web browsing, the lack of streaming audio and video, and the impotent video conferencing camera. As a music phone, however, the W880i is stylish, easy to use, and it sounds great—everything you’re looking for in a combo device. It could easily replace an iPod nano, though the Sony Ericsson music transfer software, admirable as it may be, doesn’t live up to iTunes. If you are interested in importing the phone for its music capabilities, go ahead, you won’t regret it.

Despite the polyphony having 40 chords in the W880, the handset does not provide a breakthrough in sounding of mp3 tunes compared to other Sony Ericsson branded phones. The speaker is average volume-wise and sounds pretty good, however its sonic merits fall flat while on the street – in fact the volume level offered by the W880 usually proves to be below required, but it is still more than we have come to expect from such minimalist design.

Simply a stunning piece of industrial design, Sony Ericsson’s latest entry into the Walkman range is one of the thinnest 3G mobile phones ever released. The W880i features a sleek, brushed steel face, a 2 megapixel camera, push email support, and a 1GB Memory Stick Micro (M2) – all of this squeezed into a device measuring just 9.4mm thin.