Sony Ericsson W890i review

Sony Ericsson makes two kinds of Walkman handset: touch-screen smartphones such as the W960i (reviewed in What's New, Shopper 246), and normal music handsets. The W890i is the latest in the music handset line, and replaces the W880i.

This handset has a similar shape to the W880i, but Sony Ericsson has done away with the tiny keys of that model and used proper buttons. You may struggle if you have big thumbs, though.

We're not keen on Sony Ericsson's complicated smartphone operating system, but the standard handset's interface is much easier to use. When we first switched on the W890i, it seemed sluggish, but this was fixed with a software update using the simple Update Service application, which runs from your PC. The interface has big, colourful icons, and menus are arranged in tabbed lists by category, making it easy to find the function you need.

There are plenty of applications. You can receive email from POP3 and IMAP email accounts and there's a useful calendar that will synchronise with Outlook or Vista's built-in Calendar application. There's also a countdown timer and a stopwatch, both of which are missing from some Nokia phones, plus you get three good games. The phone also has a surprisingly good web browser. It can render full-sized web pages in their original format or adjust them to fit the screen. An overview mode shows you the whole page, and you can zoom in and out to fit more of the page on the screen or make text easier to read. The phone supports HSDPA data for near-broadband download speeds, so pages load quickly.

As you might expect from a Walkman phone, the W890i works well as a music player. To get music on to the phone, you can either use the supplied Media Manager application or synchronise files with Windows Media Player. The phone can play MP3, WMA and AAC files, and both applications will convert any files your PC can play to a format that is compatible with the phone. The advantage of transferring files with Media Manager is that it will analyse the tracks for mood, and tag them accordingly. The phone will then display a graph with the songs distributed according to whether they are slow, fast, happy or sad, and you can navigate with the cursor to find the kind of song you want to hear. It works well, and you can still sort by artist, album and genre. The supplied headphones generally sound good, if a little bright, and you can plug your own into the supplied adaptor.

Although the W890i has a 3.2-megapixel camera, it lacks the autofocus and flash of larger Sony Ericsson phones such as the K800i, so images are generally blurry.

The W890i is a great music phone with a surprisingly good web browser. It's also free on a fairly inexpensive contract, so it wins a Best Buy award.