Sony Ericsson W950
Maxabout Review
Superb Music Player Phone
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Photos
Sony Ericsson W950i
The W950i is a Symbian 3G smartphone with an enormous touchscreen that supports handwriting recognition. It has a fabulous music player with 4 Gbytes of flash memory - that's enough for around 1,000 songs! There's also a built-in FM radio, plus support for office applications including email, attachment viewing, third party Symbian apps and full web browsing. The one thing missing is a camera. Also, be aware that like all smartphones, the user interface is sometimes slow and may occasionally freeze.
Apart from having no camera, the W950i is unusual in other respects. It's also the slimmest smartphone on the market, at just 15mm thick, and is also a 3G phone. It's compact and lightweight and feels just right in the hand. The W950i has a flat keypad, that is actually very easy to use, together with a jog dial and dedicated music player keys on the sides of the keypad for easy access to your music collection.
In addition the W950i has a touchscreen and stylus that makes navigation a breeze. It also supports handwriting recognition. The screen is very large (2.6 inches across), is bright and sharp, and is brilliant for navigating, managing playlists, and viewing graphics. In fact this is one of the most ergonomic and user-friendly phones around, and is a real pleasure to use. Nevertheless you should still expect to have to spend some time learning to use all of the features on this device, simply because it has so many of them!
This is the flagship Walkman phone, and it's music player doesn't disappoint. The player supports a wide range of formats, and delivers top audio quality. There's also a built-in FM radio. All of the features that you'd expect are here - a graphic equaliser, Mega Bass, user-friendly playlist management, and support for USB drag-and-drop for easy transfer of songs from PC to phone.
You can also download songs quickly with 3G. In addition, the Walkman player features support for album art, displaying the album covers on the screen while the track is playing. The Album covers can be used to select songs from the library of music stored on the phone. Just touch the image of the album cover to select. The W950i also includes the TrackID feature for recognising songs from external music sources - hold the phone close to the music, and the phone will try to match the song with its database, showing you the name of the song, the artist and the album.
As well as the music player functions, there is full support for business users too. Being a Symbian-based phone, you can download a wealth of third-party applications for the phone. Push email is supported, together with a viewer for common Office attachments. 3G provides fast download speeds, and full web browsing is available with the Opera 8.0 web browser. The large screen makes it possible to view web pages pretty closely to how they are intended to be viewed, and you can use the stylus to click on links, or to scroll. This is one of the best implementations of a web browser we've ever seen on a mobile.
In some ways, the W950i is the phone that the P990i should have been! It's really got everything that you could want except a camera. The touchscreen is a delight to use, the music player is pure quality, and the phone is very well featured in other respects too. If you won't miss the camera and don't want to make video calls, this phone is highly recommended. The only thing that prevents us from awarding a full 5 stars is the fact that, like all Symbian phones, the user interface can sometimes be slow, and the phone does have a tendency to occasionally freeze or shut itself down.
Main Features of the Sony Ericsson W950i:
- 3G Symbian smartphone
- Touchscreen user interface & handwriting recognition
- TFT, 262,144 colours, 240 x 320 pixels Screen
- Media player
- FM radio
- Mega Bass
- MP3/AAC ringtones / 40-voice polyphonic ringtones
- Speakerphone
- Messaging: SMS, MMS, Push Email
- 3D Java games
- Opera web browser, RSS feeds
- GPRS, modem
- 4GB internal memory
- Bluetooth, USB mass storage, Fast Port, Infrared
- Triband plus 3G