Sony Ericsson W960i review

Most Sony Ericsson Walkman phones are small, inexpensive models. The W960i is Sony's flagship Walkman phone: an expensive, fully fledged smartphone as well as a music player.

The W960i is based on the Symbian UIQ operating system, which, unlike the Symbian Series 60 Edition used in Nokia smartphones, is designed for a touch screen and stylus. The phone has no directional keypad, but there's a BlackBerry-style scroll wheel on the side of the phone, which you can use to cycle through and select menu options. Unlike a BlackBerry, there's no back button under the scroll wheel, so you can't use the phone one-handed. There's also no directional keypad or short-cut buttons to common functions such as contacts and calendar, so you have to go through the menu to make a call or send a text. The menus are easy to navigate, but you still need to go through several steps to perform simple tasks. The phone's interface also runs fairly slowly, and there's a noticeable pause between selecting an option and anything happening.

Thankfully, the W960i works better as a music phone. You can transfer music directly into the phone's music folder in Windows, or use the Media Manager application to find music on your PC and copy it across or rip it from CD. MP3, AAC and WMA files are supported. The music application is easy to use and sorts your music by artist and album. Unfortunately, it's slow to scroll through tracks and artists and is nowhere near as smooth as on Sony Ericsson's standard Walkman phones.

Passive noise-cancelling headphones are included. They plug into your ear and block most external noise. The headphones sound good, but are overly bassy. You can plug your own headphones into the W960i with the supplied adaptor. The phone managed an astonishing 24 hours of battery life in our tests.

The W960i has the usual smartphone functions. There's built-in wireless networking, and the wireless application makes it easy to search for hotspots and get online. The web browser can render complicated web pages, but runs slowly. There's a POP3 and IMAP email client. The Quickoffice application lets you view and edit Microsoft Word and Excel documents, but PowerPoint presentations and PDFs can only be viewed. Typing messages on the wobbly keypad isn't much fun, and the inaccurate touch screen makes the onscreen keyboard tricky to use. The 3.2-megapixel camera has a bright LED flash and so takes reasonable night shots, but daylight pictures were lacking in detail.

Sony Ericsson's W960i has a good music player and incredible battery life, but the phone's interface is hard to use and the camera is also disappointing. Sony Ericsson's standard music phones, such as the W880i, are faster and easier to use, and have almost as many features. They're also significantly cheaper.

Author: Chris Finnamore