Sony Ericsson W302

Back when I was a nipper - 1990, to be exact - anyone worth their salt owned an England football shirt. The team had just narrowly missed out on reaching the World Cup final and the entire country was feeling suitably patriotic.

Sadly for me, my mum decided that the official Umbro shirt was a little pricey and instead I was bought a cheap knock-off from the local market.

Needless to say, I wasn’t impressed.

Almost twenty years on from that terrible day I find myself experiencing similar feelings of deflation. The reason is the Sony Ericsson W302, which (for the sake of justifying the opening anecdote) feels like a cheap imitation of the more desirable Sony Ericsson W890.

Although the phone feels a little on the cheap side when you first scoop it up, the overall design and build quality are both above-average. The majority of the phone is constructed from plastic but the front is metal (even though it might not feel that way to begin with).

All in all, this is a very tidy and well-realised handset; it’s slim, lightweight and feels fairly solid and dependable.

One area of the design that may cause consternation for those of you with chubby fingers is the keypad: it’s made up of very thin buttons.

In practice they function a lot more effectively than you might assume, but there’s no denying that when it comes to texting, the bigger the key, the more comfortable the experience. Expect plenty of botched messages when using the W302.

Considering the low price of the phone you’d naturally expect corners to be cut somewhere along the line, and in the case of the W302 it’s the feature set that really suffers.

Despite boasting what appears to be a much faster CPU than other SE handsets (animations such as screensavers seem to run with more pace), the phone is lumbered with a poor camera, a low-res display, a pitiful amount of built-in memory and a relatively archaic edition of SE’s Walkman player.

There’s also no 3.5mm headphone interface (the dreaded ‘fast port’ adapter once again rears its ugly head), but this is largely in keeping with many other phones in SE’s Walkman range, so it’s to be expected; only the expensive Xperia X1 has packed this near-essential feature so far.

Putting all of these negative aspects aside for a moment, the W302 does at least provide a decent amount of portable entertainment. Despite sporting the same problematic circular D-pad design as its more illustrious relatives, it actually grants a pretty pleasing degree of control.

The unit we reviewed came with two games - 3D Rollercoaster and QuadraPop. The former shows off the phone’s 3D muscle quite effectively and is jolly good fun to boot, while the latter is a pretty basic puzzle game that has already been bundled with several other Walkman handsets in the past.

After downloading a few other Java games we were surprised by the performance of the D-pad, although it should be noted that the phone’s low resolution screen (176x220 pixels) might impede the installation of some of the more advanced games currently doing the rounds.

The W302 isn’t aiming to compete with the iPhone or T-Mobile G1 so throwing stones at it for not being as powerful as the leading mobiles is a bit pointless. This is clearly aimed at the PAYG market, and when reviewed in this context it’s easier to forgive the myriad of shortcomings the phone possesses.

Having said that, unless you have absolutely no interest in the capability of your mobile and simply crave something to talk and text on, it’s hard to recommend the W302. For a little bit more cash you can pick up something infinitely more powerful and the functions the phone does have are compromised to the point of being useless.

In ‘Credit Crunch’ Britain it’s easy to see the W302 being moderately successful, but just like that fateful day back in 1990 when my mum bought me the wrong football shirt, getting this phone in lieu of a more worthy device feels mildly humiliating.