My birthday this year coincided with my mobile network giving me a new mobile phone to play with, which was nice. I've been a bit of a fan of Sony Ericsson for some years, and thought it was about time I got a Walkman phone, to compliment Paul's nice Ericsson camera phone. The only thing I wasn't sure about was would the new W880i work with my Mac. I'd had a nightmare in the past with a Nokia music phone that was so hard to use as a music player I gave up on it. Sadly when I got my new phone out of the box it looked as if this was going to be another PC-only affair. However, after rooting around on the web I found out that I could copy music easily onto the phone. Plug the USB into the computer and then into phone, allowing you to turn the mobile effectively into a hard drive, then just drag and drop the music into the phones music folder. As easy as that, and it works perfectly. The sound quality is pretty good, and the headphones are better quality than the iPod's. The only down side is I can't use my nice Shure in-ear phones with it (so much for interoperability then!). The other neat feature on the W880i is the TrackID™ music recognition service which is powered by Gracenote (the guys who provide the track listing for the CD's you copy into iTunes). TrackID records a few seconds of a track from the inbuilt microphone, sends the track to the database for identification and returns the information to the phone. The Sony Ericsson website claims that "once the track is identified, the Walkman player 2.0 also includes an integrated download service so there is no need to exit the music player to access the web browser to visit on-line music". Not sure if my nice network provider has disabled that function, or if the recent closure of the Sony Connect store is the reason why I can't buy the music I'd tagged. A missed oppertunity. Having spent the last week doing a survey of retailers in-store music policies, I also discovered that trackID is not quite as good as the UK-developed Shazam service (dial 2580 and follow the instructions), which tagged all but one song, while trackID only managed about 50% of queries! I supsect this is down to Gracenote's US-centric database. It certainly struggled with all of the booming dance music I was trying to tag in some clothes stores I went in.
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