I bought a Sony Ericsson W550i 2 months back. Its a great phone and gives excellent value for its cost. So all was well and i thought i will live happily ever after. But no, since yesterday the phone is stuck in WSOD – White Screen of Death. The phone shows a white screen when i try to start and doesn’t get anywhere from that. I tried all the common ‘engineer’ tricks like restart( no use) take out battery and restart( still no effect) remove battery & SIM wait for a couple of hours, put them again and restart( still the same). I got a feeling this is a much serious issue at this point. Web searches pointed out that this is quite a known problem and quite a number of people have had this. Apparently a ‘firmware flash’ could bring this back to life. One of the forums suggested to use the update service from Sony ericsson’s website to upgrade the firmware. I tried that and it got stuck at 90% updation. So the firmware is really really screwed. I mailed the product support and they asked me to send it to their UK service center. I am not gonna do this – international shipment & a delay of 3 weeks being the main reasons. Now, i have to take it back to the seller and hope he can do something for me. The seller is in a different town and i cannot go there until Saturday. If you have had this problem drop in a line to suggest what worked for you. If you havent found out still watch this space for more updates. Update 1 : Aug 07 : The service center duly accepted the phone after checking the warranty card. I didnt have ‘proof of purchase’ but that wasn’t a big issue. The phone should be ready by Tuesday Aug 08 – however all user data wil be *lost*. Not that i had a lot of files/settings. The loss of address book is the one that i am very upset about. Update 2 : Aug 13 : I got my phone back. Not all’s well. All my files are gone and so is the addressbook But my phone is back.
Review: October Last updated June 2009 Rating: In a nutshell: An attractive slide phone with the outstandingly good Walkman 3.0 music player, and not forgetting the cool shake control. Do you remember the good old days when mobile phones just worked? We're talking about 2006. In those days, Sony Ericsson made phones that did what it said on the tin. Then in 2007 most of the phones they made didn't work. Some, like the W580i, just fell to pieces when you opened the box. Others, like the W910i were absolutely brilliant until you switched them on. Then they switched themselves off again and had to go back to the shop. There are signs that Sony Ericsson have turned the corner in 2008, but they still have a long way to go before their reputation is restored, so we're going to be suspicious of any new phones they produce until they've proved themselves to be reliable. This is particularly relevant for the W595 because it looks almost exactly the same as the incredibly unreliable W910i released a year previously. It looks the same on the outside. It looks the same on the inside too, with an identical list of features, apart from a slightly upgraded camera. Only the name has changed. Oh, and it's got fatter and heavier too. What have Sony Ericsson put inside it? Not a bigger battery, because the battery life seems to be almost exactly the same as the W910i. Maybe it's new firmware. That's it, Sony Ericsson have spent a whole year fixing the bugs in the W910i firmware, and the new firmware is so much better it weighs an extra 20 grams. Mystery solved. OK, so this phone is just the same as the W910i, except it's heavier and the bugs have been fixed. This makes it a fantastic phone. We loved the W910i when we first reviewed it. It was only after the user reviews started flooding in that it became obvious that there was a problem. The W595 is a nicely styled slide.
I know Pier is pretty excited about his new Sony Ericsson mobile and I was fine with my K750i, too until this one morning about two weeks ago. I’ve noticed that my phone was much less stable down here (in Australia). Every now and then it got stuck and I had to reboot it (=remove the battery, wait, put the battery back in). But that very morning not even that helped! It just gave me a white screen or got stuck just at the logo. After about 20 tries I managed to get a network connection again.but not for long. So I called the support hotline. They said since it is a German phone it *might* have some problems with the Telstra network. ( Huh!?) He suggested a master reset and a firmware upgrade. If I cannot get it working I have to send it back to Germany as there is no such thing as a world wide warranty for it. They would have to charge me in Australia although it’s only about half a year old. After fighting with the crappy Sony Ericsson update software I got the new firmware installed. ( The updater software insisted that my version of flash was not compatible – but did not even bother to tell me which one was the right one. Installing an old version of the software itself worked in the end) A few days went by and it looked as if my phone was working properly again until it got stuck again on Sunday. This time though it did not even bother to turn on at all! Removing the batteries, putting them back in, charging nothing – just a black screen. I fear I have to check how much the repair will be. This sucks so badly – so far the worst experience I’ve had with any of my phones. *sigh* Fortunately a colleague had a spare mobile so at least I am reachable again.
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