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Not that long ago I reviewed Nokia’s review5500 Sport and at the end of the process decided the handset wasn’t really suitable for anyone serious about getting fit.

I have to say from the start that I think the same about Sony Ericsson’s W710i. If you want some tech to help you get fit you are going to be far better off with something that can track your movement through a GPS antenna and measure your heart rate than you are with something that uses a pedometer to measure distance travelled and thinks a calorie counter is a useful fitness aid.

That said, let’s look a little deeper.

The quad-band GSM W750i is a clamshell handset and as a rule I tend to find this style the least attractive, but I am warming to it and the W710i is helping me along in this respect.

It is very neat and tidy when closed – measuring just 88mm tall, 48mm wide and 24.5mm deep. As a result it is easy to pocket. When opened it grows to 160mm tall and there is a lot of unused space between keypad and screen which I am not so happy about. It weighs 101g, and I bet some Sony Ericsson executives are kicking themselves about two of those grammes.

The internal screen is a 176 x 220 pixel 262,000 colour offering that is clear, sharp and bright but would have benefited from more pixels. While the numberpad is large, the navigation button is not, but it is easy enough to use and the remaining buttons are well located and easy to find. There are dedicated buttons for the music player, Internet access, tabbed shortcuts and alerts area and power on/off.

Side buttons enable you to lock the keys, use the built-in camera and control volume. Bluetooth is built-in and so, happily, is infra-red. There is a mere 10MB of internal memory but the phone comes with a 512MB Memory Stick Micro card, whose slot is on the left edge of the casing under the battery cover.

If the grey, orange and white colour scheme has not been designed to emulate that of umpteen pairs of trainers, then the match is a fortunate coincidence.

All the dedicated fitness software is together under one menu option whose icon is a stopwatch. There are four elements to this – Running, Walking, Results and Settings. If you want to do anything other than running or walking, forget this handset now.
Under Settings you tell the handset your height, weight, year of birth and gender. It does a little maths and calculates calories burned during exercise. It is not rocket science, and is only going to be an approximation.

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