Sony Ericsson announced the W880 today, well, W880 for most markets and W888 for a couple, which I will not pretend to fully understand, and the number that matters is 9.4 millimetres. That is thinner than a pencil, thinner than most phones on the market by a comfortable margin, and it is being sold on Walkman branding rather than on the thinness itself, which I think undersells the actual engineering achievement here.
I first heard the codename “Ai” through the rumour mill back in November, alongside enough correct detail that today’s announcement feels more like confirmation than surprise. What the leaks did not quite convey was how deliberately this thing is built around one job. There is a dedicated music key on the side. There are two speakers rather than the usual one, angled to actually project sound rather than muffle against your palm. A gigabyte Memory Stick Micro card ships in the box, which Sony Ericsson is claiming holds roughly nine hundred tracks, a number I have no way to verify today and will happily revisit once one is in my hands.
The feature I think gets underrated in the coverage is TrackID, the song recognition service that listens to whatever is playing around you and tells you what it is. It sounds like a gimmick on a spec sheet and I suspect it will turn out to be one of those small conveniences people use constantly once they discover it, less because the technology is remarkable and more because the problem it solves, standing somewhere hearing a song you cannot place, happens to everyone regularly.
The genuine tension in this phone is between the Walkman ambition and the storage reality. Nine hundred tracks sounds generous until you remember what a real music collection looks like, and the response here is expandable storage rather than a bigger built-in number, which pushes cost and inconvenience onto the buyer in the form of a card they have to remember to purchase separately. That is the correct engineering tradeoff for a phone this thin. It is also going to be the first thing anyone who owns a proper iPod complains about.
What I keep coming back to is that Sony Ericsson clearly understands they are not going to out-iPod the iPod on pure music player terms, and are betting instead on being the phone that does music properly rather than the music player that happens to make calls. Whether that distinction matters to a buyer standing in a shop is the actual question, and I do not think anyone, including Sony Ericsson, fully knows the answer yet. Spring release is what they are saying today. I will believe the exact date when a carrier confirms it.