April 7th, 2008 by admin.
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By Michell Bak at Unofficial Sony Ericsson Blog
Sony Ericsson W910i can be considered a big brother to the mid-end W580 Walkman phone. Both are pretty thin and have got the slider form factor. However where W910i really separates itself from the W580 is in terms of features, design and pleasure of usage. W910i is the first phone to have Walkman 3.0 with new music features and it’s also one of Sony Ericsson’s débutantes at using the A200 operating system.
Official product pictures of Sony Ericsson W910i
Advantages
- Quad-band GSM, EDGE, UMTS & tri-band HSDPA
- Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR (with A2DP support)
- Excellent, large 2.4 inch TFT display
- New A200 platform with exciting new features
- Walkman 3.0
- Very thin and sexy slider design
- Excellent keypad with good tactile feedback
- 1 GB MemoryStick Micro M2 and music accessory comes bundled
Disadvantages
When comparing W910i to the older - yet just as stylish - W880, there is a clear resemblance in terms of material quality, feel in hand and design. Both are extremely well designed and feel very good in your palm. They’re also both well built and thin. W910i is and will be a trend setter - just like the W880 was.
W910i compared to the thinnest ever Walkman phone, the W880
W910i comes in a fancy, relatively small see-through plastic box showing off the phone and a USB MemoryStick Micro card reader, that comes along with the phone. Also included in with my W910i was a 1 gigabyte MemoryStick Micro memory card, a Walkman stereo headset (in a sexy red colour!), a 3.5 mm. jack output cable (MMC-70), a charger, manuals, papers and a Walkman software CD.
12.5 millimetres of pure sexiness
W910i is a slider phone with a mid section depth of only 12.5 millimetres. The design is rather curvy and it curves at the end of the phone, which gives you a good grip of the phone and makes it easier to slide it open. The materials being used in W910i are quite good as well - it looks like it’s some sort of metal and it does feel like it as well, but unfortunately I think it’s only plastic. The surface is shiny and it simply looks sexy - especially the red one, in my opinion!
The soft keys and the alphanumeric keypad are really great to use and of good size! The tactile feedback is excellent, but sometimes it does leave a feeling of “did I press or not?”. The buttons on the alphanumeric keypad are relatively close to each other, so people with large hands could have a slight problem with using them. I’ve got pretty large hands myself, but haven’t encountered any problems with that.
W910i front - sexy design and a good keypad
Sony Ericsson W910i is Sony Ericsson’s thinnest slider and measures a mere 12.5 millimetres as said earlier on. Complete dimensions are 99 x 50 x 12.5 millimetres. It weighs 86 grams and feels pretty light.
W910i’s back is designed with a lock for the battery cover at the bottom - near the speaker (which is located at the bottom, too!). The camera is located at the top of the phone. I’m a little concerned about this as the camera lens isn’t at level with the rest of the rear making it vulnerable to scratches.
W910i back - loud speaker at the bottom, camera at the top and a silver Walkman logo
The slider mechanism of W910i feels quite sturdy although it’s a tiny bit wobbly when opened. Far from nothing serious, though. The spring is excellent and works like a charm. It has the ‘click’ sound when sliding up and down - just how it’s supposed to be!
The slider mechanism is quite sturdy and the spring is excellent
As said earlier on, W910i is really thin when considered it’s a slider. This is why the keys on the sides are quite small. Anyhow, the left side of the phone doesn’t feature anything but a FastPort connector used for transferring files, listening to music, etc. The right side is the ‘crowded’ side with the camera shutter key, memory card (M2) slot and volume / zoom controls.
W910i sides - connector on the left side, camera shutter key, memory slot and volume keys on the right
The curved bottom of the phone has nothing but a Walkman logo and text to it, but in my opinion this is quite nice and makes it look great. The top of the phone has a small on/off button and a Walkman button for fast access to the Walkman player.
Walkman logo at the bottom of the phone, Walkman button on the top along with the on/off button
The W910i has a battery cover lock, which you have to unlock before being able to remove the battery cover. It’s quite nice and works very well. Once unlocked you can easily remove the cover and have access to the battery, SIM card and various phone informations like the IMEI number and production week. The SIM card is a bit hard to get out once inserted - I think it would be an advantage to have smaller hands and fingers here. The battery is a BST-39 and official standby battery life is 400 hours, while you can talk up to 9 hours on a fully charged battery. I haven’t tested the talk time (would be impossible for a guy - and probably pretty pricey as well!), but the overall battery life is quite impressive; about three days of power usage before depleted on a ~90% charge.
Battery cover lock, battery & SIM card
Show-off user interface
I have always been a fan of Sony Ericsson’s user interface and menus. The user interface is really easy to get started with, normally quite fast to browse through and there are lots of nice effects and extras like Flash (Lite) menus and wallpapers.
Standby screen • normal menu • Flash menu
The W910i is no different. The Flash implementation in W910i is by far the best I have ever seen on any Sony Ericsson phone. Not only are the three themes (five themes in total) with Flash menu and Flash wallpaper really nice to look at, they also move correspondently to the phone’s movements (thanks to the built-in accelerometer). This means that if you tip the W910i left when using the ‘Soundscape’ theme, the wallpaper and menu animations will go left. Tip it right and they’ll go right. When navigating back and forth with the Flash themes, the phone will also vibrate if this setting is turned on. Hardly useful for anything, but a fun detail.
The menu is usually a 3 x 4 icon grid but some of the themes with Flash menus change this making it either horizontal or like a circle.
Activity menu • Settings
W910i is running the A200 software platform, which is the new version of Sony Ericsson’s most used operating system (used for feature phones only). The new software platform means that there’s no longer any dedicated back-button on the phone - instead you’ll have to use the right soft key now. The Choose-button is located at the centre soft key and the Settings-button is now at the left soft key instead of the right side in former versions. Another thing that has changed is the addition of dedicated call and end-buttons, so you’ll no longer have to use the soft keys to accept incoming calls or hang up. Furthermore the W910i has the regular Activity menu-button, which will bring up the Activity menu at any point in time, where you have direct access to running applications, games, new events, short cuts and Internet bookmarks. All in all the new software platform is working quite well, although it’s a bit more heavy on the processor of the phone resulting in a slightly worse performance than older phones running the A100 software platform. I am sure this will be fixed in a firmware update, though.
Built-in applications, organizer and more
The phone comes with two pre installed Java applications - Audible and Music Mate 4. ‘Audible’ is an application that allows you to download magazines, books, news papers and podcasts to your phone making you capable of listening to it whenever you want. I must admit that I have not tried out this application fully, because I’m simply not that interested in doing any of the above things. ‘Music Mate 4′ on the other hand is a really funny application. With it you can create your own music and beats. The idea alone is really cool, but how about adding motion sensor support to it and assign directions to an instrument? This is exactly what Sony Ericsson has done and this makes the application really cool - shake it and produce music! Here’s a video to show how it works.
The ‘Organizer’ can be found in the menu. It holds several important things such as the file manager, alarms, calendar, notes, timer, stop watch and calculator. The file manager is without doubt the best file manager on any feature phone out there - I’d even say it beats some smart phone file managers. It’s possible to set up to 5 different alarms and you can choose which days for them to ring on, when and if it’s a returning alarm or not. I’m very pleased with the alarm and find it at good use every day for getting out of bed! 
The calendar is quite good and gives a good overview of the highlighted month or week. There are quite a few settings and stuff to fill out when making a new post and I personally don’t feel like I’m missing anything. The notes application can be used for creating notes that can then be shown on the wallpaper. The calculator is rather simple and can be used for dividing, multiplying, subtracting, adding and percent calculations. The length of calculations is limited to 9 digits. The last noticeable thing is the password protector application where you have to set up a password and then you can store your secret informations, passwords and alike in there in case you should forget about a password.
File manager • pictures in file manager • alarms
Calculator • calendar • standby note
If you go to the ‘Entertainment’ spot in the menu you’ll see three “DJ”-applications; VideoDJ, PhotoDJ & MusicDJ. Each can be used for creating and optimizing the chosen media - i.e. you can edit and create videos with text, colours and effects with VideoDJ, while PhotoDJ can be used for fixing and editing photos and at last you can create your own polyphonic tunes with MusicDJ. TrackID is a service that can recognize music, but more about that later. There is also a Bluetooth remote control application for managing i.e. your computer or a presentation via Bluetooth. It’s also possible to record sound with W910i - this application is also found in ‘Entertainment’.
Entertainment menu • MusicDJ • PhotoDJ
TrackID • VideoDJ
The last and probably also the best application on W910i is the Media application, which’ user interface reminds you of the user interface of PSP. It’s slick and it looks good. You can use the D-pad for navigating through this menu. The menu interface rotates accordingly to the phone, so if you’re holding the phone in landscape while using this application, the user interface will also be in landscape mode.
The photo and music part of this application is rocking, but there is a problem with playback of video files on W910i. Some video files can be quite laggy and the audio is out of sync by several seconds. This isn’t exactly nice and is an annoying firmware bug, that should be fixed as soon as possible!
Media menu in portrait and landscape mode
Browsing the music and photo part of the Media menu
Camera - excellent colours, bad performance
W910i has a 2 mega pixel fixed focus camera on the back. Fixed focus means that the focus of the camera can’t be set, making it impossible to get high quality close-ups and hard to get pretty landscape pictures without having a great loss of detail like leaves on a tree being really blurry and almost fading into each other. The camera is also lacking a flash.
Camera interface and photo viewing
The camera interface is the new and was introduced with the A200 software platform. It reminds you of the K850’s camera interface, but lots of features are missing and the design is different. The new interface has a nice feature when browsing through the settings - if you hover any setting it’ll automatically pop-up as a sub menu. This is much easier than having to press every icon before being able to set the settings.
The camera short cut overview
The prior amount of short cuts mapped to a selected number of buttons on the keypad are missing. All you can do now is press ‘0′ to bring up a help window, where it is shown that the two gaming keys above the screen (A & B, as they are called) will act like Shoot mode-short cut and Night mode-short cut. Furthermore you are able to change the lighting settings (± 2.0 lux) and of course use the digital zoom - however this can’t be used in full 2 mega pixel resolution and will only give you a maximal zoom of 2.5 x in VGA resolution (0.3 mega pixel) only. It also seems like there is a zoom bug, because the phone gets extremely laggy when using the digital zoom. The up and down navigation keys can be used for switching between Camera, Video recorder and finally the photo gallery, where your last shot will be showcased. Here is a total overview of Settings on W910i camera:
- Shoot mode - Normal, Panorama, Frames & Burst
- Picture size - 2 MP (1600 x 1200 pixels), 1 MP (1280 x 960 pixels) & VGA (640 x 480 pixels)
- Night mode - Off & On
- Self-timer - Off & On
- White balance - Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Fluorescent & Incandescent
- Effects - Off, Black & white, Negative & Sepia
- Settings - Picture quality (Fine & Normal), Review (On & Off), Save to (Mem. card & Phone mem.), Auto rotate (On & Off), Shutter sound (Sound 1, Sound 2, Sound 3, Sound 4 & Off) & Reset counter.
OK, enough about the settings and general camera background info. Lets have a look at how the W910i’s pictures come out (press to enlarge).
W910i camera samples
As you can see it is very clear that there’s a great loss of detail in the pictures. Areas with lots of details often get blurred out both detail and colour wise - sometimes it might even look like a water coloured painting or an effect that has been applied to the photo. In order to snap the best photos with W910i you’ll have to do it in great light conditions (preferably around noon on a bright summer day) and the subject has to be about 1 meter away from the camera (because of the fixed focus). W910i doesn’t manage dark environments that well not only because a flash is lacking, but also because the shutter speed is very slow making the pictures blurry. Although the phone tries to prevent this by turning up the ISO level (and thereby also the amount of noise), it fails terribly at doing so. Luckily W910i comes with PhotoFix which can do minor fixing regarding to light and colours, but this rarely works out the way you want and you’ll have to manually edit the photo in PhotoDJ afterwards to get the best result. None of this can be recommended though as it’s all digital processing and making a dark photo more bright will only cause more noise.
Camcorder user interface
Videos can be recording in a maximum resolution of 320 x 240 pixels (QVGA) and with 15 frames per second. The quality is fairly good, but can’t be compared to other alternatives on the market that can record in both a higher resolution, better quality and a better frame rate. Just about all photo settings can be used in video mode, too.
You can find a video sample here and here.
Photo album • X-Pict Story in action
The photo viewer is excellent and is found in the Media menu just like the audio and video player is. You can browse through different categories - latest photos, camera album, photo tags and at last pictures, where all pictures from the “Picture” folder in file manager is shown. If you choose to browse the camera album, the photos will be sorted by month. There are nice effects in the album, like when pressing a thumbnail picture, it’ll smoothly enlarge and end up filling up the display. You can tag the photos (i.e. if you’ve been to the zoo, then it’ll be easier to find only the photos from the zoo) and there’s also an option to play a slide show of the photos. X-Pict Story is the name of the slide show application and it enables lots of effects when the slide show is playing. You can listen to moody melodies and there are also quite a few effects on the photos, like panning and zooming.
Triumphs as a music phone
W910i has the new Walkman 3.0 music player. The most noticeable changes compared to version 2.0 is the enhanced navigation, overview and addition of a few features such as SensMe and ShakeControl.
SensMe is used for splitting up songs into different categories depending on mood and tempo. In my opinion it’s pretty useless and it requires that the media software, that comes with the W910i, has analysed all the songs and transferred them to the phone through the same software. It doesn’t sound like being much of a problem, but this piece of software is extremely RAM hungry, imprecise, laggy and slow! It’s about five times faster to transfer to files without the software, but then songs can’t be used with SensMe.
ShakeControl is a rather nifty feature, which makes use of the built-in accelerometer in W910i. Just hold down the Walkman-button on the top of the phone while the music is playing and start shaking the phone like a mad dog! For every shake, the phone will change song. Again, this is probably just meant as a show-off feature and it is easier to randomize the play list and then press the D-pad for the next song.
SensMe
So lets start the music playing… The phone accepts most audio codecs - M4A, MP3, AAC, AAC+, E-AAC+, WAV, WMA, etc., so there shouldn’t be any problems on this front. If you’re not happy about the way the music is being played, you can always choose to set a equalizer setting or do a manual one. It also features MegaBass. You can hide the Walkman player if you want, so you can do other things while listening to music. A single press on the Walkman button at the top will minimize it and another press will open it again. The player is really nice looking and very easy to use. It’ll take you less than a minute to get familiar with everything.
Player main menu • Walkman player • equalizer settings
So, what’s the audio quality like? Generally it’s very good, but when it’s at full volume it can get a bit distorted. You should try to keep it at 6 (6,5) / 8 in terms of volume level. At this volume level the audio is clear and good. The bass is nice, too.
It is possible to change the visualization to either display to album cover or one of five different visualizations (waves, Walkman lines, inner twirl, circles, album lines) or no visualization at all. It is of course also possible to use a repeat and randomize feature when listening to music.
The light in the soft keys changes to orange when Walkman is open
A cool feature is that when entering the Walkman player the light in the soft keys and around turns orange instead of the normal green/red/white colours.
FM radio with RDS • TrackID in action
W910i has a built-in FM radio, too, which works when a headset is plugged in. It’s very good and because of the RDS you won’t loss the signal when driving around - it’ll automatically find the local frequency for the radio show, you were listening to. You can save up to 20 radio frequencies (can be done automatically). There are quite a few settings and the radio can be considered one of the best ever on a mobile phone. TrackID, as mentioned earlier, is a feature that can be used with the radio. It’ll sample a few seconds of the song on the radio, send the sample off to Gracenote and finally return with details about the song, artist, album, a link to purchase the song (operator dependent), etc. All in all, it works very nicely.
Gaming is a true pleasure
The W910i comes bundled with three games: Lumines Block Challenge, Marble Madness and V-Rally 3D. The two last ones are 3D games and are in my opinion also the most exciting ones, but for the sake of good, lets start off with Lumines Block Challenge.
Lumines Block Challenge
Lumines Block Challenge is a puzzle game, where the object of the game is to match up falling blocks and create patterns. I never really found out to to play the game because it seemed so awfully boring (sorry, Gameloft!). The game has gotten good reviews, though, so it might just be me.
Marble Madness
Marble Madness is an exciting game, which is also bundled on W910i’s camera focused sibling, the K850. The object of the game is to steer a big marble through a set of challenges before finally getting it in the goal area. There are lots of levels and bonus levels, and when a challenge (a series of five levels) has been completed, you will be awarded with special content like wallpapers and a ring tone. The marble can be controlled using either the keypad or the built-in motion sensor in W910i. The easiest way is by using the keypad, but the other option is way cooler and so much more fun! The graphics of the game are quite good.
V-Rally 3D
V-Rally 3D is in my opinion the best game of them all and I have been playing this game for a year or so (had it on some of my previous phones as well)! It is a racing game, as you might have guessed already, and it is simply one of the best ever. There are 12 different racing tracks (3 countries) split up in four different championships. To start off with there’s only one championship unlocked, but when this gets completed, another one will be unlocked and so will one new car and three new tracks be. There is a total of four different cars in the game. The game play is excellent and makes use of very few controls. In the game there is a voice warning you when you should be careful of how the upcoming road is and when to turn left, right and such. It’s a nice feature, but can get a bit annoying. The graphics are excellent with exception of the world textures, that could have been done slightly better.
Well connected
As I started off with review by saying, the W910i is a Quad-band GSM phone with EDGE, UMTS & tri-band 3.6 Mbps HSDPA-support. Furthermore it has Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR (transfer speeds at about 130 KB/s) and it supports A2DP, which is the stereo audio streaming Bluetooth profile. It supports USB 2.0, which works fine and fast in USB mass storage mode.
Netfront web browser in landscape mode • Google search
The web browser in W910i is NetFront 3.4 and it seems to be working OK for minor things and browsing mobile formatted websites. It can handle full HTML websites as well but not all are shown correctly on the display. I must say that I had expected more from this web browser, but it is without doubt the best when comparing to the alternatives in other feature phones. The web browser has a Google search feature, so you can do a Google search at all time.
RSS feeds overview • adding a new feed
W910i has a RSS reader built-in, which can be found under Messaging in the menu. This one works very well and you have the option to display the RSS feeds on the standby screen, which is cool.
Email menu • reading the default welcoming email on the phone
I have yet to set up my email accounts on W910i, so I can’t really comment on that. However, according to several other reviews, the email client has been enhanced, and I certainly liked the old one, so I doubt the new one will be worse!
The world in your phone book
The phone book of W910i has room for up to 1000 contacts and a total of 7000 numbers. I doubt anybody will ever make use of all that room for telephone numbers, but W910i’s got the storage room for it. Contacts can be stored with full informations including numerous different types of telephone numbers, email addresses, website, name, picture, special ring tone, work and private related informations about postal address, title and so on. Finally there’s also the option to add a date for the contact’s birthday - this date can then be put in the calendar and the phone will remind you that the contact’s birthday is coming up.
W910i has a nice feature called SmartSearch where you can easily find any contact, or telephone number very fast. Simply type in either letters or numbers in standby mode and the phone will generate a list of matches accordingly to your input. So, if you’d want to find me and my name simply was set to be “Michell Bak” in your phone book, simply press 6 (for ‘M’), 4 (for ‘i’), 2 (for ‘c’) and so on. I could also type in 2 (for ‘B’), 2 (for ‘A’) and 5 (for ‘K’) and then my name would pop up on the list again because of my surname. Same thing would happen if I started typing in a telephone number assigned to this contact.
The phone book is excellent and easy to use
Overall, the phone book in W910i is very good and on par with the one in most smartphones out there.
Messaging monster
W910i has everything you need to be connected to your friends and family day and night. Under Messaging in the menu you’ll find the SMS and MMS management, where everything on this area happens. You can create either a MMS or an SMS. The MMS editor is the best I’ve ever seen on a mobile phone and Sony Ericsson’s editor can do lots of things with the MMS messages. The SMS editor is also the best on any phone and so is the built-in T9. Sony Ericsson makes use of the best T9 system and you can add words of your own, if you want to. W910i supports EMS, which means you can send text messages with smilies, small sounds and even funny animations. Of course the other phone has to support EMS, as well, before being able to view the content, but most phones support it these days.
Messaging • an example of an SMS message
Messaging settings • messaging management
In messaging settings you can set just about anything regarding to the SMS, MMS and email settings, data accounts and such. In the SMS part of settings, you can edit the retry time (for how long the phone will try to send a message), an option to ask for a reply and so on. Once again, messaging is Sony Ericsson’s territory and no one comes close to beat Sony Ericsson’s (almost) perfection on this area.
Calling up a Sony Ericsson executive
Calling up people on W910i is quite easy. The new A200 software platform has introduced the call and hang up buttons, like in the old days, and these are being used for calls this day today. Those and only those - you won’t be able to use the soft keys to end a call or pick up a phone call.
Calling on the W910i - yes, that is Aldo Liguori from Sony Ericsson 
The sound quality during calls is really good and clear. The volume seems to be high enough while still not being too high - there’s no risk of annoying people around you. It’s a bit different when video calling, though, where the sound quality isn’t that great and neither is the picture (only tried it on UMTS).
Video calling • call list
You can manage your calls on the phone and set the various call settings like speed dialling. The call list holds the last 30 calls (in and outgoing).
Conclusion
Sony Ericsson W910i has proved to be a brilliant phone with above average features and a music part like no other. The new A200 platform has worked flawlessly on my W910i and I haven’t experienced any bugs with it whatsoever, whereas K850 has a few.
W910i has a good variety of connections, but as a music phone it is lacking WLAN and a better web browser, so you can buy and listen to music on-line without getting a huge phone bill. But considering the price of this baby (which is low - about 250 GBP at the moment) I can perfectly understand why WLAN hasn’t been implemented.
The battery of the phone is excellent and I have only been required to charge it three times during the last 10 days. I am a heavy user, and W910i has really been put to the test and comes out with an A+ in battery life.
So to anyone out there, who are thinking about getting this phone, I can do nothing but recommend it. It is indeed great and an excellent buy for your girl friend or to make your friends jealous like you’ve never seen them before!
[Review based on firmware revision R1CA039]
April 7th, 2008 by admin.
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By Michell Bak at Sony Ericsson Unofficial blog
Sony Ericsson W960i is Sony Ericsson’s top notch music offering featuring a massive 8 gigabyte flash memory, Walkman 3.0 Touch player, QVGA resolution touch screen, WLAN & Symbian OS with UIQ 3.0. Don’t start shaking in your pants because you just saw UIQ 3.0 being used in the phone - it’s running absolutely flawlessly on W960i due to the 128 megabytes of RAM memory. Multitasking is superb and it’s nearly impossible to dry out this baby!
Official product pictures of Sony Ericsson W960i
Advantages
- 3G connection & WLAN
- Bluetooth 2.0 (with A2DP support)
- Large 2.6 inch QVGA resolution touch screen
- UIQ 3.0 - enhanced compared to earlier products
- Walkman 3.0 Touch player - best music player on a phone EVER
- 8 gigabytes of internal memory
- Nice design, size and weight
- Bundled accessories
Disadvantages
- No EDGE and HSDPA
- Booting the device is a bit slow
- No memory card slot
- Somewhat strange T9 word input - many normal words missing, too
W960i is probably one of the best phones from Sony Ericsson - also when it comes to build quality. It feels extremely sturdy and the materials used are nice. The back is rubberised, which gives you a good grip of the phone. The front is glossy and looks good, but needs a good clean a few times a day. The stylus, however, isn’t that great and feels a bit cheap. It’s good for the touch screen, though, because soft plastic has been used in the end.
The ’smart’ W960i compared to the ‘dumber’ W910i
The W960i is a black glossy box with a CD print on top of it. The Walkman logo on the side is golden and even before opening the box you get the feeling that it contains something very exclusive. So what’s in this holy box? The W960i - of course - a charger, USB cable, great Walkman headset, MMC-70 (3.5 mm jack output cable), a Walkman-branded pouch fitted for the phone and of course the usual amount of manuals in different languages, warranty papers and a CD with standard software on it.
The name is Stylish… Extremely Stylish
W960i is Sony Ericsson’s first music-oriented attempt at making a relatively small smart phone while still packing lots of features in it (business-oriented attempt was the very successful P1). In my opinion they’ve done a very good job - the phone is a mere 109 x 55 x 16 millimetres in size and it only weighs 119 grams, making it both smaller and lighter than P1. Pretty amazing (keeping in mind that it’s got a large 2.6 inch screen and many features). The phone comes in Vinyl Black colour only, and while the colour itself is fine, Sony Ericsson should have launched at least one other colour variant. It’s not really too much of a problem since the black one is very stylish looking.
The front is made of glossy plastic which feels rather good when using the relatively small keypad and it makes it easier to clean the display. The display is at level with the rest of the phone which is excellent and it feels much better to use it like this than on P1, where the display is lowered a bit compared to the rest of the phone. Furthermore, the display is protected by a plastic layer on top of the display.
W960i front - black luxurious design
The rubberised back on W960i feels very good and it gives you a good grip when using it. The back of W960i houses the camera and the large speaker. The camera is left unprotected with no lens cover. You’ll also find the plastic stylus - which feels a bit cheap - on the right top corner on the back. The battery is well protected by a good battery cover.
W960i back - speaker near the camera at the top and a shiny Sony Ericsson logo
On the left side of the W960i, you’ll find a strap eyelet, jog dial and an engraved Walkman logo. The right side houses the camera button, zoom/volume keys and a show-off-sign saying “8 GB”.
W960i sides - jog dial and strap eyelet • Camera keys and “8 GB” sign
The bottom houses nothing extraordinary - the usual FastPort connector and of course the microphone. The power button is located at the top of the phone.
Connector at the bottom • Power button at the top
The battery cover on W960i is very good and feels extremely sturdy. No chances of the battery falling out when dropping the phone or any other sort of loose connections. Underneath the battery is the SIM card holder and phone infos. The battery is a standard BST-33 (900 mAh) and the official battery life times are 370 hours of standby time and 9 hours of (2G-) calling. The battery seems quite good and does relatively good in terms of staying alive - I have to charge it every other day.
Battery cover • BST-33 battery
Best UIQ 3.0 ever
So, lets start off with the geeky stuff. W960i’s operating system is Symbian OS 9.1 with UIQ 3.0 user interface. It’s got 128 megabytes of RAM memory (73.6 megabytes on fresh boot) and a 220 MHz CPU. Furthermore it supports OpenGL (which basically has something to do with hardware accelerated graphics). So, what does this mean in a normal everyday English? It’s good a good operating system with great multitasking features, and is capable of running high quality graphics games as well
Multiple standby and menu layouts
OK, enough with the geeky stuff. W960i is known as the most highly animated smart phone ever from Sony Ericsson. And well, honestly, it’s got absolutely nothing to do with the menu system and such - if you don’t count the slow transition effects - that can be turned off, if needed - of course. It’s the Walkman player, but more about this later on in the review. W960i is running Symbian, which means you can set up the menu icons pretty much how you like them to be - either list or grid view. You can add and remove the applications to the main menu and of course also sort them into other folders and so on. There’s no option to change the menu icons, unless you start hacking the firmware, which is rather complicated and not really worth doing at the moment (lack of knowledge in this area).
Making use of all three soft keys • Large icons for easier finger input
The menu system offers three soft keys (on the screen) and both a physical and virtual back key. The soft key on the left is rarely used in the system, and is mainly for applications. The centre soft key is for selecting and performing actions (such as “Write new message”), while the one on the right is the Settings-soft key, so to speak. It usually houses the “More” fly-out menus for additional settings, etc.
The stylus pen can be used in most situations (about 99% of the time, I guess), but with the W960i it’s not necessary to use it all the time. The interface has been improved compared to, say P990i, so there’s more room for finger input.
Here’s something you wouldn’t see on earlier UIQ 3 phones - 30 applications opened
Overall, I’d say that UIQ 3.0 performs its very best on W960i (and P1i for that matter). Former Sony Ericsson smartphones running UIQ 3.0 - M600i, P990i & W950i - don’t even come close when talking about stability, multitasking and general joy of use. It seems like Sony Ericsson and UIQ Technology have finally found the perfect recipe for a stable OS.
Comes with office applications, too!
Being that W960i is a smartphone based on Symbian OS, it supports third party applications and games, that can make your phone even better and enhance its functionality. W960 comes with lots of pre installed applications. Among these are Opera Mobile 8.65 (default web browser), QuickOffice, Pdf+ and Exchange ActiveSync. Of course these are just a few, and Sony Ericsson offers loads of other applications and games - there’s even a menu option for “More applications” in the Multimedia menu. Here you can try out lots of applications and games for free, and buy if you decide so!
Organizer menu • Calender showing month and week view
Notes with formatting • Handwritten note • Setting up a task
If we shall have a look at the more business related applications on W960i, we’ll find the excellent calendar, the nice note application with full support of both keypad and touch screen input (drawings, etc.), to do-list, QuickOffice with Word and Excel editing (go for DocsToGo if you need a better application, though!), Pdf+ for PDF-viewing and finally a business card scanner. Simply snap a picture of the business card and the application will scan the picture and look for details. When it’s done, it has created a new contact and gives you a chance to edit, if there should be any mistakes. This is extremely nice!
QuickOffice • Editing a Word document with QuickOffice • Pdf+
Business card scanner • Different business card standards
‘Normal’ applications like calculator, file manager, alarms and stop watch are to be found in the Tools menu.
Time and date control • Converter application • Connections manager
Remote synchronizing • Calculator with basic features • Excellent file manager
But W960i is not all about work in mono coloured suits and such. It’s also meant as a fun device to use, which is why it has several small and funny applications and games - lets start with the applications. You have a good video player with support for a large amount of file types, on-line music and video streaming, MusicDJ and of course a voice recorder with added functionality (TrackID). Now, lets move on to the games! The amount of preloaded games isn’t great, there are only two. These are Vijay Singh Pro Golf 3D, which is an absolutely amazing golf game, and also QuadraPop, which is an arcade game, many people might find quite amusing.
Entertainment menu • Voice recorder with TrackID • MusicDJ
Video player in landscape view • Vijay Singh 3D golf game
Best Walk-cam
The camera in W960i is a 3.2 mega pixel CMOS sensor with auto focus. Auto focus enables taking both macro shots as well as full figure landscape pictures. Furthermore it’s got an LED flash on the back for taking pictures in bad lighting conditions.
UIQ 3 camera interface
The camera interface in W960i’s camera application is about the same as the one in Sony Ericsson’s two other smart phones with camera - P1i and P990i. It’s optimized for using both stylus and the jog dial, which makes it a bit hard to use your finger only. It’s possible, but takes time and practice. Overall, the interface is nice and smooth with see-through menus and cool gimmicks, like removing all icons when taking pictures, so you’ve got a full viewfinder.
There is a set of short cuts in the camera on W960i as in most Sony Ericsson branded solutions. You can get an overview of these by pressing ‘0′ (zero) on the keypad. Among some of the short cuts are focus settings, night mode and flash mode. The W960i has a total of 3x digital zoom, but the zoom has an effect on the resolution. This is what Sony Ericsson calls Smart Zoom. No zoom is 3 mega pixels, 1.1x - 1.2x zoom is 2 mega pixels, 1.3x - 1.6x is 1.3 mega pixels, while 1.7x - 3x zoom is VGA (0.3 mega pixels).
You can easily switch between the different modes (photos or videos) on the right of the screen as well as settings. There are a quite a few settings in W960i (most presented with informative pop-ups available):
- Shoot mode - Video, Frame, Burst & Photo
- Frame size - 3 MP, 2 MP, 1 MP & VGA
- Auto focus - Normal, Macro & Off
- White balance - Cloudy, Daylight, Fluorescent, Incandescent & Auto
- Light - On & Off
- Effects - Black & White, Sepia, Solarization, Negative & Off
- Quality - Fine, Normal & Economy
- Night mode - On & Off
- Save to - Media memory preferred, Media memory & Phone memory
- Auto review - Off & On
- Shutter sound - Shutter sound 1, 2, 3, 4 & Off
- Self-timer - On & Off
- Reset file number - Reset now
Now, lets have a look at some of the photos taken with this baby! Remember, press to enlarge the photos.
W960i camera samples
As you’ve probably noticed, the W960i does quite well with the camera and is without doubt the best camera phone in the Walkman series at the moment. W890i won’t come till next year, and although this will also be packing a 3 mega pixel camera, there is no auto focus in it, so the pictures won’t be at much use. Now, back to the W960i.
There is a certain amount of noise in the photos and this is because W960i’s noise reduction isn’t that aggressive. This, however, also gives much better details and the photos become more real life-like. The colours are also very much like real life, and I’ll let you decide if this is an advantage or disadvantage. Personally I believe it’s an advantage, since I’m fairly good with photo editing software and could easily fix the colours.
The camera is fairly quick and there’s no substantial shutter-lag in good lighting conditions. In what I would call ‘fair’ lighting conditions, however, the camera viewfinder seems to be reacting very slow and focussing is slow, too [has been fixed in later firmware update!]. If this is a firmware fault or not, I don’t know, but it’s not that great. When using the LED flash in dark surroundings, you’ll have to stand still with the camera for about a second or so. It’s not that bad, but luckily it’s a bit quicker sometimes. Again, it depends on the lighting conditions.
Videos can be recorded in QVGA resolution (320 x 240 pixels) with 15 frames per second. The format is 3GP, and the result is pretty good. Not as good as some of the other offerings on the market, but more than approved for every day usage. Most of the features from photo mode are also available in video mode. The interface is the same.
You can find a video sample here.
Once you’ve taken your pictures, you can edit them in the Picture Editor application. This application is nowhere to be found other than through the Gallery, so don’t be surprised if you can’t find it in the Tools menu or somewhere alike. The editor is quite simple, yet packs the most necessary features like clipart, text, frames, different effects and corrections as well as the option to paint the pictures with the stylus in a set of colours.
Photo album • Zoom in action
The picture gallery is quite nice and has features like advanced slide shows and nice zooming options. It’s easy to browse around in and you have the option to browse through just about all photos on both the phone and media memory.
Music mania!
Those of you, who have read my W910i review, will know that I pretty much named the W910i the king of music by saying that it “triumphs as a music phone”. Well, guess what - I was wrong! W960i is the new king of the castle and does like the W910 feature Walkman 3.0 player with the exception that this is the smart phone - also called ‘Touch’ - edition, which makes it much better!
Walkman 3.0 Touch player without visualizations • Music rating
The Walkman player can be accessed in several ways. Either by pressing the dedicated Walkman button in the middle of the keypad, pressing the large Walkman field in standby mode or by opening the application in the main menu. In short - you’ll have access to your music from anywhere! Once the player is active and opened, a set of three touch sensitive music keys will appear in a bright whitish orange colour. And trust me, you’ll be using these a lot!
Player layout • Searching • Album with cover, mood and rating set
Auto playlists • Time machine • Different visualization effects
The Walkman player itself is pretty easy to use. The functions are nicely sorted out into different categories such as Artists, Albums, Compositions, Moods and Playlists. All are represented with a large icon on its left. In the background you’ll see animated particles flying around in the air around the “laser beam” hovering your selection. See the video below for a full walk through of the player with all animations on.
The W960i is the most complete music phone out there at the moment, and does pretty much everything the competitors does. Plus more, that is! Here goes a few of the ’special’ features;
- Auto playlists - extensive amount of auto playlists with everything from most played to least played and latest additions to bookmarks.
- Time machine - a very cool feature that sorts the music by year. Then you simply select a year of a decade - like the 80’s - and a playlist with all the 80’s music starts playing. Furthermore there are some cool effects when playing songs!
- Moods - you can pick out moods for every song on your phone. There are four to choose from and if either the name, colour or speed doesn’t fit you, you can change it!
- Compilations - the phone can also sort albums by what kind of albums they are. Say, it’s a “best of…” album, then the phone will somehow recognize this and put in in the Compilations menu.
- Smart album cover zoom - simply by pressing the album cover in play mode, it’ll get enlarged so you can see details.
- Visualizations - there are five different visualizations available in the Walkman player. The colour varies accordingly to the mood and so does the speed. It seems to be OpenGL-based and looks great, but is somewhat of a gimmick feature.
- Great layout - W960’s Walkman player layout is by far the best I have ever seen on a mobile phone. It’s extremely easy to use, there are loads of settings to personalize it and many show-off features.
- Equalizers - there are lots of equalizers on W960. 13 of them, to be exact. This includes everything from Pop and Rock to Jazz and Classic. Also included is MegaBass, of course.
Visualization settings • Player settings • Easy playlist navigation
Press to go to album • Equalizers • Album cover zoom
Audio quality wise, this baby rocks! The bundled headset with W960i is by no means crappy and gives a good sound at a fitting volume level. The bass level seems to be just about perfect. The only thing I dislike a bit is that the headset is an in-ear one, which pretty much seals you from the outside world. This is both positive and negative, though. Some love it, while some hate it.
W960i supports a variety of audio codecs - all kinds of AAC formats, m4a, MP3, Real Audio and WMA. Support for codecs such as OGG and FLAC is missing.
FM radio with RDS and lots of features
Not only does the W960i have the best music / Walkman player ever, it’s also got the best FM radio application ever! Just like the Walkman player, there are also visualizations in the radio application. It’s an RDS FM radio that can store up to 20 radio frequencies automatically and of course also manually. The reception is nothing else than marvellous! In Denmark we’ve got multiple radio stations that send out all kind of information with the FM signals, such as the radio station name, current song playing and also phone numbers if there’s a contest or something like this. W960i is capable of displaying it all!
If you don’t know what song is on the radio, but you seem to like it, don’t worry about not knowing the name. W960i’s got TrackID, that’ll quickly record a sample of the song (works with the radio and music from the surroundings - not music played on the phone, though) and it’ll be sent off to Gracenote, where it gets analysed and a few seconds after, you’ll be redirected to a website with the song’s name, artist, album and even a link to where you can buy the song (this is operator dependant at the moment). It’s such a genius application - and it works with both via the mobile network and also via WLAN!
Golfing on a large screen
W960i comes with two games; Quadrapop and Vijay Singh 3D Pro Golf. Now, I’ve already gone through the first game in my W910i review, so you can read about that one there. Either way, it’s also the second game that’s the far most interesting one.
Vijay Singh 3D Pro Golf
Vijay Singh 3D Pro Golf is a fully 3D animated golf game with great graphics and sound! It’s running pretty good on the W960i - a bit laggy, though - but it’s still very playable. In the game you can compete in lots of championships and beat the contestants. You’ll win money for every won championship, good round and so on. The money can then be spent on making your character even better (new clothes, golf bars, etc.).
Lacking EDGE and HSDPA
W960 is a tri-band GSM mobile phone with GPRS and UMTS support. EDGE and HSDPA support is lacking however, which is sad for a music and web phone like W960i. It’s got Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, but no EDR, so you’ll be stuck with data transfers at about 50 KB/s. USB 2.0 is one of the big selling points with this phone and it’s lighting fast! I’ve transferred a few gigabytes of videos to the phone and it took about five minutes in total, which is more than impressive. It’s also got WLAN (b-standard) up to 11 Mbps, which is totally fine with me.
Opera Mobile 8.65 in portrait mode • Whole page zoom
Landscape mode • Usable buttons at the bottom
The web browser in W960 is Opera Mobile 8.65 and although it seems to be working great for most websites (both fully HTML-based and also xHTML-based ones), it’s lacking a better Flash and Java support. Other than that, it’s great and supports multiple tabs opened at once, high speed downloads, website fitting, landscape mode, option to save websites and so on. It’s got just about everything
RSS reader • USEB’s RSS feed on W960i
RSS reader in action • Settings
The RSS reader in W960i is the best in all Sony Ericsson phones. You can download the RSS feeds by either mobile network data transfers or WLAN. All the feeds can be managed and sorted right on the phone and if you click on an RSS icon with the web browser, it can automatically be added to your RSS feeds. Clever thinking!
Email menu on a slightly modded W960i • reading an email from My-Symbian.com
To start off with I had some trouble setting up my Gmail account on W960i, but I quickly resolved this and now it’s working great and I’ve set it to download full emails with attachments, too. Currently I’ve got about 300 emails in the inbox and the phone hasn’t slowed down a bit. The email set up is quite easy and most people should be able to do so. It also supports push emails, which I’m pretty fond of.
Smart phone book
W960i has got room for up to 2000 contacts, all with full details and several telephone numbers, fax number, email and so on. Like with most other Sony Ericsson (smart) phones, you can store loads of informations about each contact. I’m not going to spend time listing all these, but trust me - there are lots of things to fill out!
Contacts • Viewing a contact
The search capabilities of W960i seem a bit old compared to the two ‘dumb’ phone, K850i and W910i, that have both got SmartSearch making it much easier to find contacts. Overall, the search feature is OK, but not great.
Messaging monster
The handset supports MMS and SMS messaging. There’s a limit of 100 kilobytes when creating MMS messages, and a limit of about 10 SMS text’s length when creating SMS messages. It’s very unlikely that some will use more characters than this when writing these small messages.
W960i handles the messages quite well and I have yet not found any limits on how many messages it can store.
Text messages can be created with smilies, animations, mono coloured bitmaps, sound effects and different kinds of formatting. This is by far the best EMS implementation ever on a smart phone (this goes for all UIQ 3.0 devices). Texting can be done either by using the alpha-numeric keypad, the on-screen keyboard or by using handwriting recognition. However, W960i is a bit weird on this front. If you’ve enabled T9, which is the intelligent word speller, then there’s no option to use handwriting recognition. This is only available when having set the phone to multi-tap mode. Furthermore I found the T9 word book lacking lots of every day words and general use of the T9 is a bit strange as you must use the jog dial on the side to change the word. This means that you’ll have to use both the keypad, the jog dial and in some cases also the stylus on the screen to write a message.
Messaging • Animations • Test message
Phone part is great
There are two ways to make calls on W960i - regular, old school 2G-calls, that most people use, and then there is 3G video calls, that just about nobody uses.
The first day I got my W960i was also the day of the first call. Cool, I thought, because then I could already start testing the sound quality. It then appeared that the person calling, was no less than the Administrative PR Team leader at Sony Ericsson. Anyhow, the sound quality seemed very good and it was loud and clear. A couple of guys were watching a film in the back of the room at full blast, but I could still hear what Elona said and it seemed as though she had no problems hearing what I said.
I have yet to try out the video calls, but I’m sure they’ll work as well on W960i as they do on other Sony Ericsson phones.
Phone • Calling • Video calls
You can manage your calls on the phone and set the various call settings like speed dialling. The call list can hold the last 30 in and outgoing calls (in total).
Conclusion
Sony Ericsson W960i feels like one of the best products ever from Sony Ericsson. The operating system and user interface is strong and performs well. Multitasking is good because of the excessive amount of free RAM memory.
Calls are good and the speaker is loud, so there’s no chance of missing a call, unless it’s on silent profile. The vibrator is good and you’ll feel it most of the time.
Battery wise, the phone isn’t a top player, but it’s not bad either. On a full charge it lasts about 2 days of normal use (in my case, that’s about 2 hours of WLAN use every day, camera usage, texting, a few calls, gaming, music and so on).
The price of the Sony Ericsson w960i phone on a contract in the UK has remained quite high since launch due to the extensive features and target audience the phone is geared towards but it can found for free on contracts as low as £40 per month with plenty of inlcusive minutes and texts
Overall, this is an excellent smart phone with lots of features and an acceptable price. If you need a QWERTY keyboard, then I’d suggest you’d look at P1i, which is W960i’s work oriented brother.
[Review based on firmware revision R6F41]
April 3rd, 2008 by admin.
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By Michell Bak, 21st of March 2008 at Unofficial Sony Ericsson blog
The Sony Ericsson W890i is the multi-talented successor of the revolutionary W880i that was announced in a little over a year ago. W890i follows up by increasing the depth of the phone with a meaningless 0.5 millimetres while adding a whole lot of features and a design that is to die for.
Official product pictures of the Sony Ericsson W890i
Advantages
- Slick and beautiful metallic design
- Size and weight (only 9.6 millimetres thin!)
- Beautiful display
- HSDPA, Quad-band GSM, EDGE and Bluetooth 2.0 EDR
- Walkman 3.0 for superb music playing, TrackID
- 2 GB MemoryStick Micro
- FM radio with RDS
- Superior user interface and positioning services
- Access NetFront web browser 3.4
Disadvantages
- Display is only 2 inches large
- No W-LAN for buying music online
- Camera lacks auto focus and a flash
- No accelerometer for motion based applications and features
- Limited internal memory (~ 26 megabytes free)
If you compare the W890i to its predecessor, the W880i, you’ll quickly notice that W890i looks more complete in its design than the now 1-year old W880. There’s no obvious difference in the thickness of the phones, so I’m not too worried about the 0.2 millimetres the W890i has put on.
Both phones are obviously not heavy to hold and especially the W890i feels really good in your palm. Where the W880i had square-like edges, the W890i has rounded edges, which feels much better.
The W890i comes in a swift-looking box that holds 3 different smaller boxes; one with the phone, one with the bundled accessories and one with the manuals, guarantee papers and the application disc. Being that this is a music phone, it comes with some nice starter in-earphones that give a nice bass. The mandatory charger and USB cable is of course also present in the sales box.
“It’s less than a centimetre thick!”
W890i sports a regular candy bar form factor with rounded edges. It is obvious that the design of W890i has been inspired by circles and round lines - probably to prevent getting the edgy look of the W880 again. A crisp 2.0-inch QVGA resolution display is to be found on the front of the phone. It can display up to 262.144 colours and does an excellent job in terms of colour saturation and brightness. The display can be viewed in direct sunlight without any problems.
The keypad on the W890i has a good feel to it. Buttons give a good feedback and it is generally a pleasure to use. The alpha-numeric keys are well-spaced with only the navigation D-pad and soft keys being a bit close to each other. The keys are a bit small but that’s what you’d expect from a small phone like this.
W890i’s dimensions are 104 x 46.5 x 9.9 millimetres and it weighs a mere 78 grams. The small size and light weight makes it fit in any pocket and gives it a good feel in your palm. W890i is available in three colour trimmings; Espresso Black, Mocha Brown and Sparkling Silver.
The back of W890i is very simple to look at. High quality brushed metal is used to cover most of the back with a shiny Walkman logo breaking the purity of the material. A camera is placed on the top as well as the Sony Ericsson logo. Just between the camera and the logo is a mono loud speaker. On the bottom you’ll find the lanyard eyelet.
The left side sports the standard Fast Port connector for connecting to your computer, listening to music and alike. A golden Walkman button is also present which acts as a short cut key for easy access to the Walkman music player. On the top of the sides are two battery cover locks to keep the back cover in place. The right side is primarily for camera use with the camera shutter button near the bottom of the side and zoom / volume keys near the top of the side. The MemoryStick Micro slot is actually also on the right side of the phone but is hidden behind the back cover, which must be removed first to manage the memory card.
Nothing besides a Walkman logo is placed in the bottom of the phone. The top holds the on/off button. This is quite peculiar since the on/off button was placed at the ‘c’-key on the W880.
The battery in the W890i is a standard 950 mAh BST-33 Lithium-Polymer battery. Sony Ericsson claims the standby battery life is 360 hours while talk time is 9½ hours. These numbers are quite spectacular for a phone this thin. Best of all is that they seem to be correct. The W890i manages to keep going for about 4 days of normal use which is more than acceptable.
It’s flashy and vibrating
Sony Ericsson’s feature phone user interface is intuitive, fast and very easy to use. It takes only minutes getting used to and it’s a graphical pleasure to look at. There are quite a few flashy effects in the interface that makes the handset a bit funnier to use.
