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Ah Media. The biggest selling point for this Walkman-branded feature phone. We almost wish Sony Ericsson had added Stop, Play and Rewind buttons to the Walkman Mix's fascia, just to imitate those long-lost days rewinding the latest top 40 chart you taped off the radio. Who's with me? No-one? Excellent. In that case, on with the review…
The Walkman player is accessible through a dedicated soft key at the top of the phone, situated next to the headphone jack. It is indeed the best thing about the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman by far, but given the vanilla functionality of the rest of the phone, that isn't a tough bar to jump over.
The internal memory is a paltry 100MB, but add your own microSD card and you're able to stock 32GB of music, which is a fair amount of tuneage given that, despite there being video capability on the handset, you won't be trying to squeeze any videos onto your SD card (as we'll explain later).
The headphones that come with the handset are, predictably, two uncomfortable pieces of moulded plastic, but they cope with bass pretty well, with little distortion at higher volumes. Pop your own decent headphones in, though, and the experience is fantastic. What shines through is how much this phone is an MP3 player with the ability to make calls.
There are a couple of interesting additions to the Walkman fascia: the Zappin button enables you to preview a few seconds of a song to help you choose what to listen to, and the Karaoke button… would have been cool had it worked. Instead it simply dulls songs' lyrics to a ghostly, tinny echo, and the tracks you load onto it won't display lyrics.
Not to worry though, because the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman comes loaded with DISCO for all your karaoke needs.
Despite these couple of additions, the Walkman is a pretty simple app. Loaded music is sorted by Artists, All Tracks, Playlists and Tracks with Lyrics.
Unfortunately, playlists are preset (most played, never played, and so on) and there's no function to put together your own, which is quite frankly rubbish.
Overall, the main selling point of the Walkman capability is simply the sound quality. Other than that, the UX isn't fantastic, because everything is too simple and dumbed down, and 'features' such as the karaoke button add nothing to the experience, whereas something as small as build-your-own playlist feature is left out. Where's the logic?
As for the video player, well, we know one exists on the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman, but we couldn't get it to play any of the files we loaded, no matter what the file type, whether it was supposed to be supported or no. Awful.
