I’m starting to explore the Walkman side of my Sony Ericsson W880i. I got it as a free upgrade with a new subscription.

For using it as a Walkman I bought a bigger Memorystick Micro (M2). Not just because I wanted 2 Gbs instead of 1, but also because the 2Gb stick came with an adapter. M2 cards are very small and normal card readers don’t support the format. I need to be able to fill the card through a card reader as I only have Linux at home and the office. I get read and write errors if I use the supplied USB cable on my Linux systems.

When I got the phone I didn’t even consider the phone to be a serious mp3 player. I thought it was just a marketing thing. Phones need more and more features to impress, but so far the user interface is very smooth. It’s easy to navigate the library of music and it’s easy to add albums and songs to the play list. Let’s see what I’ll think of it after trying to drown out the voices in the office for a whole day.

The first issue has arisen. Mp3 files have tags inside them making it possible for the mp3 player to show the name of the performing artist, the title of the track, the name of the album and many other pieces of information. There are different ways of tagging an mp3. As it turns out the W880i doesn’t like a certain type. I edited the artist’s name of one album in my preferred audio player (amarok) as it wasn’t displayed the right way and now only half is shown. Oh well, this can be fixed.

It also turns out that 2Gb isn’t all that much. You might think 20+ albums is a lot, but pretty soon you will get fed up with listening to that set of tracks. It’s also not so easy to put other albums on the memory card as the transfer is really slow. Also, under Linux I have to take out the card, put it in the adapter, put it in the card reader, fill it with music, take the adapter out of the card reader, take the card out of the adapter and put it back in the phone again. Bit of a hassle.

I shouldn’t forget to add that the sound quality is pretty good.