I’ll start this review off with what you tend to notice first: aesthetics. The W810i is not the smallest phone out there, but I would say it’s definitely small enough. It’s not too tall (with no protruding antenna), not very wide at all (as apposed to the RAZR which has a tendency to look like someone took a normal phone and ran over it with a steam roller) and it’s thin enough to fit comfortably in my pant’s front pocket. If you wear pants much tighter then mine, to the point where this phone would become uncomfortable, you probably also own a purse which would make a much better home for your phone. The screen looks fantastic. It’s very bright with whites that seem to jump brilliantly out of a totally pitch black background. I have yet to see even the best plasma TV manage the kind of contrast I’m seing on this phone. Granted, it’s not 52-inches in diagonal, but without taking size into account, you’re going to have a tough time finding a better looking screen anywhere. A lot of detail has also been paid to the look of the menus. Animation abounds everywhere: the icons for the main menu pop out from the center and lists gracefully drop down from the top of the screen or slide in from the right. This all sounds gaudy, but it happens quickly, and you don’t really even notice it unless you are paying close attention. The end result is an interface that appears very smooth and well designed.

Arguably, it would seem, the most important thing for a phone to do is make and receive calls. The W810i does this as well as any other, I suppose. A punch on the left soft key brings up your calls menu, which shows calls sent or received with newer calls at the top, allowing you to quickly call people you’ve recently talked to. All recent phones allow something like this, but some (Motorola, I’m looking at you) restrict the list to dialed calls making it difficult to call a person back unless you have called them recently yourself. It’s nice to see the list populated with all recent calls.

Call quality seems good to me, but there are many factors that affect this apart from the phone. Who you are calling (transcoding from a GSM codec to a CDMA one can degrade sound quality quite a lot) as well as the quality of your own signal have much more to do with sound quality then what the phone does with that signal once it gets it. One issue that may come up is the volume of the ear speaker. With cell phones this too tends to vary a lot with your network and the person you’re calling, but if you need to crank the volume to hear a conversation above a noisy background, you may run out of room.

Despite the tiny keys that take up considerably less real estate then the screen, text messaging is actually quite pleasant. The buttons are raised nicely, and although they are very small, they have great tactile feedback. I was especially impressed with the T9 predictive text interface. Words in the dictionary are found easily, of course, but it’s also easy to quickly switch over to a “Spell Word” interface when a word is not in the dictionary. After you’ve spelled the word with old-fashioned tapping, it’s inserted into your message and the phone’s dictionary, so you won’t have to repeat the process for the same word later.

The big selling feature for this phone is its music abilities but I’ll admit that I had pretty low expectations when I bought it. I can’t honestly imagine a situation when I’ll know ahead of time that I will want to listen to music (in order to lug around headphones), but not want to pack my iPod as well. While I still doubt I’ll ever use it as one, this phone really can function as a solid music player. I was able to plug it straight into my MacBook with the included USB data cable and it was recognized as two mounted drives, one for the memory included in the phone and one for the 128-megabyte memory stick. I was then able to drag some songs straight from iTunes to the phone, and they were all detected perfectly. After pressing the dedicated Walkman button I was able to browse by artist, then album or track, just as you would expect. The headphones however, are terrible. Don’t be confused by the looks, they are not Sony Fontopias. Fontopias are not great headphones, but they are at least pretty good for the price. The headphones that come with the W810i are a joke. The bass is not only overwhelming, it’s terribly inaccurate. Everything below about 300 hertz sounds mashed together into one solid wall of bassy noise. Use decent headphones, however, and it actually sounds very good.

The phone seems to have no problems with AAC files from iTunes or MP3 files encoded with LAME’s “medium” VBR preset. This is great for a music player, but the W810i applies these abilities to other areas as well. I was able to transfer MP3s to the phone and use them as ringtones. I’ll never play music through the headphones, but it sure is nice to have characters from Futurama yell at me when I get a call.

The camera on the 810i is quite impressive. It records 2 megapixels of resolution, which is a lot for a cameraphone, but the sensor itself is still very small, meaning that low-light shots are still going to have a large amount of noise. When you are taking shots outdoors, however, you can get noise-free images that will display full-screen on even 20-inch monitors. A pretty impressive feat, I would say, for a phone that costs about half the price of a professional digital SLR body. You also get many options, including a night mode (which I would assume decreases the shudder speed), macro mode, and adjustable white balance. What’s most impressive though, is the lens, which is not fixed focus. Most camera phones have a fixed focus at about 8 to 10 feet and use a high aperture so that objects within a large range of that focal point will not be too noticeably out of focus. It’s a compromise, and there are a lot of trade offs, such as loss of detail and high noise (due to the reduced light let in by the higher aperture setting). The lens on the W810i, however, can auto focus across the entire range, and as close as several inches in macro mode. This means the aperture can be set nice and low (2.8) and you can get crisp shots of your subject. And if this weren’t enough to impress you, there’s also a flash which is bright enough to have my subject complaining that she saw spots after the shot. When you have this phone in camera mode, it really feels like you are working with a tiny camera rather then a cell phone. While I wouldn’t leave a good consumer camera or SLR at home, this phone can take a pretty good shot if you are in a pinch.

Phone size for me is very important, but so are features and quality, and I don’t seem to be willing to trade features for a smaller size once a phone has gotten “small enough”. I’ve considered some of the Motorola candy bar phones that are only a fraction of an inch thick. In the end, however, the option of carrying around 2 gigs of music and a great camera makes the slightly larger size worth it.