The Sony Ericsson W350 is an ultra-compact GSM phone that's intended to double as your digital music player. To go along with its small size, it has a small screen and an equally-Lilliputian keypad covered by a flip. This flip has buttons to control music playback, but they're not real buttons - this portion of the flip is flexible and you're really just pushing through it to the keypad itself. It sports a 1.3-megapixel camera and includes Walkman-branded music software, which works really well. The W350 is offered by AT&T and is currently available for free with a new 2-year contract.

Despite its tiny keypad, the W350's dialing speed is pretty fast. The interface is generally snappy and easy to navigate, though without a home button it can get annoying to repeatedly press the back button to get to the home screen when you're deep in the menu structure. While it has the necessary organizer functions to keep your contacts, calendar, tasks, and notes in order and even sync them with your PC (Mac users are left a bit high and dry here), its capabilities are not as robust as you'd find on smartphone. The W350 doesn't have a built-in email client, offering only a web portal that requires internet connectivity to use, so you'll need to be sure you have a data plan if you want to use it to check your email.

The W350 offers easy set-up for some popular IM accounts, though you'll be charged for each incoming and outgoing IM as a text message. Creating SMS and MMS messages are a snap, with a particularly good job at making it easy to add media to an MMS message. Web browsing is a bit painful on the W350, with web pages horribly compressed and hard to navigate on its tiny screen. It's a similar situation for viewing video on the small screen, and the W350 offers very little video compatibility with popular file formats to boot. Music playback is the star of the W350's show, though, with a plethora of dedicated music controls on the outside of the phone to make it easy to control playback and good Walkman music software to play and manage your music. You'll have to buy your own Memory Stick Micro storage card to keep your music on, however - the W350 doesn't come with one in the box and only has a measly 9MB of internal memory.

In terms of connectivity, the W350 has Bluetooth and a number of useful profiles, including the one that makes it possible to use stereo Bluetooth headphones to listen to your music. Beyond this, the W350 doesn't offer much in the way of connectivity without Wi-Fi or the ability to connect to AT&T's high-speed data network.

Performance (read the full lab performance results at Wirelessinfo.com)

In terms of audio quality, the audio received by the phone may be choppy at some frequencies but shouldn't pose too many problems overall. Relatively, sound sent by the W350 is better, though there are still some areas where the person you're speaking to may hear choppy sound. We also look at side tone, which is the amount of your own voice intentionally piped back to you through the phone's earpiece that's meant to help you judge how loudly you're speaking. The W350's side tone is a little lower than the ideal level, meaning you'll hear less of your own voice piped back to you than you should and you may speak more loudly to compensate for this.

The W350 has a 1.3-megapixel camera that doesn't yield very good resolution and noise is very high in low-light conditions, though color accuracy isn't too bad. The camera interface is uncomplicated, requiring no need to reference the user's guide to get around, though the same can't be said of the photo album software with its unintuitive way to start a slideshow. Unfortunately, the W350's camera can't record video, so you'll be restricted to capturing those hilarious moments out with your friends in still images only.

Battery life is an area where the W350 shouldn't disappoint most users. Though it lasted less than the claimed "up to 7 hours" in our call time test at 6 hours and 40 minutes, that's still a good amount of time on the phone in between charges. Music playback battery life came in at 10 hours and 31 minutes - again, not too shabby. Web browsing is the weak link comparatively, but it's still not bad at 5 hours and 46 minutes.

Comparisons (read more in-depth comparisons at Wirelessinfo.com)
Music-oriented cell phones are quite popular these days, and there's no shortage of other comparable options out there. T-Mobile offers the Nokia 5310, another über-tiny phone, that comes with headphones and a storage card in the box, unlike the W350. Verizon offers the LG Chocolate 3 that's capable of over-the-air music downloads through Verizon's VCAST store, but it's a bit pricey in comparison to the W350. Relative to these devices, the W350's edge is its price at $0, though the fact that you need to buy a storage card separately to use it as a digital music player negates this a bit. If you already have the right storage cards on hand and a pair of headphones with the right proprietary connector, the W350 is a good choice. If you want a complete package with all the accessories you want in the box, a device like the Nokia 5310 will be a better choice.