Not all of us can afford to get the latest and greatest cellphones out there, but this doesn’t mean there aren\'t affordable phones available with some sharp features like a decent music player.

Music features

The Sony Ericsson (SE) W205 is the ideal phone if you\'re on a budget and love music. It includes a decent combination of music features such as an MP3 player, FM radio and TrackID music recognition technology. The latter records a few seconds of a song, runs it through an online music recognition service and within seconds tells you the track information such as title and artist. You can even record any song you like off the radio and then use TrackID to get the info.

The phone’s speakers offer good quality sound, as do the provided earphones. There’s no 3.5 mm jack, and the included earphones were a bit basic. SE claims 13½ hours of music playback, which should get you through the day.

Other notable features

Besides the music features, the phone has a bland 1.3 megapixel camera, which takes very average pics. The W205 offers a paltry 5 MB of internal memory, and they don\'t include a memory card so don\'t forget that in your budget. You can expand the memory, but only up to 2 GB. There\'s also no data cable included, so if you want to tranfer songs via PC you would have to do it through Bluetooth. Battery life is good since there’s no Wi-Fi or 3G connectivity draining the phones juice. The talk time is a claimed nine hours and standby is up to 425 hours.

At a recommended retail price of R999, the W205 offers a great music experience and a capable mobile phone for anyone with budget constraints. If only SE included a memory card and data cable.