Sony Ericsson W960i Review
Sony Ericsson's flagship Walkman phone offers a wealth of
features: it's a 3G SmartPhone with a 3.2 megapixel camera,
video recording and a Walkman music player, video calling, , an
FM radio, email, web browsing, Bluetooth and WLAN connectivity
and 8 Gbytes of user memory.
The large screen and always on 3G connectivity make mobile web
browsing and email a reality. The Opera web browser is supplied
pre-installed, and a document viewer and editor is available for
working with attachments. These features combined with the
touchscreen user interface make the W960i into a powerful
business tool that can start to compete with the likes of
Blackberry. In fact, Blackberry Connect can be installed,
enabling push email and contact synchronisation. As the phone
runs Symbian, there are literally thousands of applications
available for download.The Ericsson W960i is Ericsson's flagship
Walkman phone and is an upgraded version of the W950i. It's a 3G
smartphone running the Symbian OS and has a touch screen display
in addition to a normal keypad. It's a large phone and quite
heavy too, yet it retains a classy elegance, and is quite a
usable phone. At least the size does enable the LCD display to
be large (2.6 inches). The keypad is easy to use and the touch
screen feature works well. In addition to the touch screen menus
and the numeric keypad, the phone also supports handwriting
recognition using a stylus.
The predecessor to the W960i came without a camera, which many
thought was a major omission. Sony Ericsson have fully taken
this on board and the W960i has a powerful camera: 3.2
megapixels with autofocus and an LED flash. It lacks the more
powerful xenon flash found on Sony Ericsson's flagship
Cyber-Shot phone, the W850i, but is nevertheless one of the
better camera phones on the market. The camera can also take
video clips, and 3G video calling is available too.
A stereo headset is supplied with the phone, and you can
optionally purchase a Bluetooth headset to listen to your music
wirelessly. In addition to the music player, the W960i has a
built-in FM radio with RDS. The W960i is a Walkman phone, so
let's look at the music capabilities first. The first thing to
point out is that the W960i has a fixed memory, so you can't add
a memory card, but that shouldn't be a problem as the memory is
a whopping 8 Gbytes. That's enough to store around 2,000 high
quality MP3 tracks, and is more than most rival phones can offer
even with memory cards added. The touchscreen interface is at
its best when using features like the music player, as you can
literally touch the album art of a song to select it. It makes
the music player even easier to use than an iPod Classic. With
the Walkman 3 music player you can play, rewind, fast forward,
equalise, shuffle tracks and create playlists. There's a
dedicated key for starting the Walkman music player. Software is
supplied for transferring music from your PC and for ripping
tracks off CD's.
The W960i is a very powerful device with outstanding music
capabilities and a good all-rounder in other respects. It would
have been nice to see a HSDPA-enabled implementation of 3G, but
the ability to connect to Wi-Fi compensates for this to some
extent. It would have been nice to have quadband too. It also
has a tendency (like all Symbian phones) to sometimes be a
little slow and shaky, especially when running applications.
Nevertheless, the W960i is in many ways outstanding, and it's
only because it's so good that these issues are worth pointing
out.
The Cheapest Mobile Phones on the Market