Sony Ericsson W200i

Status: 🟢 Fully functional

“Daaaamn, I worked at a sawmill for half a year just to be able to buy this!!” said my buddy as he picked up this piece from my collection. Even though this was the cheapest phone under a well-known brand, the average student could hardly afford it. $200 at the time could feed you for a month—and you’d still have money left over for ice cream.

And yet, the package was rather spartan, not to say downright barebones: a VGA camera, a tiny 128×160 px display, no Bluetooth, a memory card (if I remember right) with a pathetic 256 MB, while 1 GB was already the norm, and a pair of the most budget-tier HPM-60 earbud headphones, with no fancy rubber tips.

To give you a clearer picture: Sony back then was like a Japanese Apple, trying to squeeze money out of absolutely everything they could. More often than not, it was through accessories incompatible with anything else.

As was common at the time, the same hardware chassis was reused for another model aimed at a different market niche. Sony Ericsson churned out almost every iteration in twin pairs, hoping to increase profit margins. But these two were a particularly cursed pair.

The production-line sibling of the W200i was the K510i. If you put them side by side, the resemblance becomes instantly obvious. However, the K510i had Bluetooth and a better camera, but—no memory card slot! That’s the kind of trade-offs you had to deal with back then: either photos or music.

As for me? I’d choose the music.

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