Sony-Eriksson W800i/W810i

heatopher

Hi,

I'm a relatively naive soul as far as mobiles go, just surviving on simple payg up until now, but I've just moved down to London and it's starting to seem more practical to have a contract deal, and if I'm going to do that I might as well get one that can do a few tricks. So, I'm looking for a bit of advice (hopefully less confusing and contrasting than I've got in all the shops).

What I want:

Firstly, I'm thinking about getting into journalism, so a phone that can record my phone conversations would be very very handy. When I asked in the shops, the most often praised phone was the Sony-Eriksson W800i/810i. But I couldn't get any clarity out of the shop-people about whether this phone would record when I'm using the hands-free kit, or a bluetooth earpiece (obviously it could be cumbersome to set the thing recording when you're holding it directly up to your ear). Some said sure no problem, and others said it would only work directly up against the ear. So... can anyone set me straight on this? Has somebody out there managed to get that to work with hands-free and/or bluetooth?

Any advance on Sony-Eriksson? Needless to say that if someone can suggest a better phone, I'll investigate further. If not, just out of interest, could anyone tell me what filetype the recorded files are on the SE phones (MP3, MIDI, OGG, AIFF, or whatever other flavours there are)? Just to know how easily I can transfer them over to the computer, and edit them later on....

Next requirement: to be quite honest, I'm a pretty clumsy guy, and so I need to be sure that the phone I get can take a few knocks.

General things: I do want to be able to listen to my MP3s on the thing, and decent radio reception would be nice, but don't really care at all about the visual stuff (camera, video messaging etc). I know that any advanced phone has all that anyway, but just that it's not a big priority...

Anticipated usage: not massive to start with. I'd imagine that 200 or 300 mins per month would more than do, and 50 or so texts would probably be ample. One thing that I would definitely like to have would be the "rollover" thing, where the minutes or texts left over at the end of the month go through to the next month.

Suggested deals? Better to have one that is a bit flexible, and would allow me to increase the number of minutes if that turns out to be necessary.

Last thing: just out of curiosity, why does the more recent and therefore supposedly more advanced SE W810i have less internal memory (20MB) than the predecessor W800i (64MB)? I realise that it probably doesn't matter when you have all that space on the half-a-gig removable card, but anyway... is it something to do with being quad band as opposed to tri band? Is it any kind of serious loss?

Lots of questions.... Hope someone out there is kind enough to feel like bothering. Thanx in advance,

H