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It’s here! I’ve had a play with it and I can tell you everything you need to know about Nokia’s most eagerly anticipated phone of the year. The new Nokia N96…
When you first pick up the Nokia N96 you know from it’s huge 2.8 inch screen that it’s going to be something special. It’s slightly wider and taller than the Nokia N95 8GB but a few mm slimmer. When the two-way slide mechanism is closed, it’s a nice size and it never feels too big or bulky. The N96 has a built-in accelerometer, just turn the phone sideways and the screen automatically rotates into a widescreen aspect. The screen rotation is noticeably faster than other Nseries phones. Beneath the screen are the usual navigation and menu keys, along with media player keys. There are 11 buttons in all. On the side you’ll find the volume control and camera button and on the back is a useful kick stand, allowing the N96 to be placed on a desk for viewing videos or movies. Slide the phone open and you’ll find a standard keypad. It looks cheaper than the keypad on the N95 8GB but it’s comfortable to use, even with big fingers. There are some nice touches though, such as the backlight fade on the keypad when the phone slides open.
The Nokia N96 has the latest N-Gage gaming engine and a powerful Dual ARM 9 264 MHz CPU. It runs on the latest version of the Symbian S60 OS, which is v9.3. I won’t go into too much technical detail about this as anyone who’s interested should already know what it is. A Symbian OS means you can run more than one program at a time and install software applications on the phone. There’s a lot of third party software available that’s compatible with the N96, such as sat nav programs, games, utilities and all sorts of interesting gadgets.
The Nokia N96 has 16GB internal memory which can be expanded up to 32GB using a memory card. I have to admit that after owning an N95 8GB and reading the initial specs for the N96 I wasn’t convinced that it would provide much more. I’m happy to say I was wrong. It has similarities but it appears to be a much better phone. Just before release it was announced that the UK version of the N96 would support the BBC iplayer. This is the BBC’s seven-day catch-up application. You can watch all the top BBC programmes on your mobile for free. This is an incredible feature, especially with the Nokia N96’s kick stand and 2.8 inch screen. It can sit on your desk while you catch up with the latest EastEnders or Holby City. You’ll never miss an episode again and you can watch them any time. The music capabilities on the N96 are equally as impressive. The 16GB memory means it can store loads of music, really loads. You can sort and select by pre-defined playlists, artist, album or genre. Music can be downloaded directly to the phone from the Nokia music store or you can transfer music files from your PC or Mac. The N96 also has a stereo FM radio with RDS. There’s a 3.5mm audio jack for plugging in your favourite headphones or you can use wireless stereo Bluetooth headphones. The media capabilities of the N96 are superb.
The 5 megapixel camera has a top spec and takes brilliant photos, although the camera button can be a it awkward to use. It has a Carl Zeiss lens, autofocus, digital zoom, LED flash, macro mode for close-ups, light exposure adjustment and a range of timers. Don’t be bedazzled by the marketing hype surrounding the 8 megapixel war. To put it in perspective, a 2 megapixel image will show in full detail on a high resolution 22 inch monitor. So if you plan only to view your photos on your computer or even if you want to print A4 sized images then 5 megapixels is already more than enough. The camera on the N96 is absolutely brilliant, you won’t be disappointed. The N96 can also record video at 30 frames per second there’s a secondary video call camera mounted discreetly above the screen.
With Wi-Fi you can browse the web on the Nokia N96 at speeds comparable to your home broadband. If you’re on the move the N96 will use 3G and dual band HSDPA to connect to the web. The Nokia web browser is easy to use and you can also download and install a third party browser, I recommend Opera. The N96 has GPS and has Nokia maps pre-installed, which is another really useful feature. With GPS your photos taken with the N96 are geo-tagged, not only are they stamped with the time and date but also with the exact location.
I was sceptical at first but I’m now convinced that the new Nokia N96 is enough of an evolution for existing N95 8GB users to upgrade. The BBC iPlayer is a wonderful addition. Then there’s the extra memory, which is expandable to 32GB, the new N-Gage compatibility, the nicer design and all the little improvements too. This is a brilliant phone.
Do you want a free Nokia N96? We have it with 600 minutes and unlimited texts on O2. Line rental is £35 per month on an 18 month contract. This is our most popular N96 deal and is highly recommended. No gimmicks, just a free N96 on a top value tariff.
The Sony Ericsson C902 is Sony Ericsson’s latest Cyber-shot branded phone on the market, and with its slightly updated camera software and additional features, it is also the best Cyber-shot phone on the market, although it lacks a xenon flash. While C902 does pack a decent feature set, the most impressive thing about it is undoubtedly its build quality and feel.
Official product pictures of the Sony Ericsson C902
Advantages
Quad-band GSM / EDGE / UMTS 2100 / HSDPA 2100
Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR
Extremely well built
Nice design and good quality feel
Phone software
Loud speaker
Well-performing camera
Good call quality and network reception strength
Bundled memory card reader
Disadvantages
Only 2100 MHz 3G support
Only 2 inch display
No GPS
No WLAN
No xenon flash
At times sluggish user interface
I’d have to say that the phone most similar to the C902 is the ageing T650. Both are very well built thin phones that look great and feature a nice camera. In terms of specifications, it’s rather similar to the K850, although there are a few software differences and quite a few hardware differences.
The C902 box is very much alike the K800/K810/K850 ones. Everything is separated in smaller boxes inside. Apart from the phone itself and its battery, also included is a charger, USB cable, a standard stereo headset, leather wrist strap, USB M2 card reader (CCR-70, as shown below), software CD and a the usual user guides, etc. All in all it seems like a rather nice collection of bundled accessories.
Incredibly well built
C902’s display is a relatively small 2 inch TFT display. Its resolution is the usual 240 x 320 pixels, which is more than enough to make the display look very crisp. The display can show up to 262.144 colours. The colours are well saturated, the display is bright and it’s pretty legible in sunlight. Having said so, it is not as good as the one in K850 or W760.
Around the display are eight touch-sensitive camera shortcuts that work very well – more on that later!
Next on the list is the keypad. I’m personally not much of a fan of it. It’s too hard to press, and the tactile feedback isn’t very good. In addition to this, the keys are placed too close to each other, which makes it even harder to use.
The upper keys, soft keys and navigation D-pad generally work a bit better than the alphanumeric keypad, although they’re far from great either.
C902’s dimensions are 108 x 49 x 10.5 millimetres. It is actually a bit long, and it’s even longer when the camera protection has been slid open. Its thin waist line makes up for it, though. C902 tips the scales at 107 grams, which is mainly because of its metal body. The weight in combination with the thin body makes it feel very good in hand.
C902 is available in a few colour variants; Swift Black and Luscious Red. I think my personal favourite would be the Luscious Red one, as the red colours around the front and on the back makes it a bit more interesting to look at.
The back of the C902 is rather clean. Sony Ericsson decided to put a powerful speaker on the bottom back of the phone, and hide the camera with a special cover mechanism. I’m not sure how durable this sliding cover will be, but it seemed to be pretty sturdy, although I only had the phone for about three weeks.
On the left side we’ve got the FastPort connector, and nothing else. This is the connector you use when charging the phone, transferring data, and connect it to a headset or any other wired accessory.
The right side is also pretty clean, although it houses the camera shutter key and zoom/volume keys. The placement of these keys is rather comfy when in camera mode, although it’s not that great when listening to music.
The bottom of the C902 holds a set of microphones (yes, two of them!), and the top of the phone holds nothing.
The battery cover covers most of the back. It can be removed pretty easily, unveiling the metal body of the C902. The cover hides the Memory Stick Micro slot, as well as the SIM card slot and the battery.
The battery is a standard 930 mAh BST-38 (Li-Polymer). Official battery statements are really good – 400 hours (350 hours on 3G networks) of standby time, or 9 (3½ on 3G networks) hours of talk time. My experiences with C902 show that the official figures are about right, so that’s great!
User interface
The most important factor when deciding whether or not a user interface is good is undeniably how easy it is to use and how speedy it is. The A2 software platform used in Sony Ericsson’s mid/high-end feature phones has been significantly updated with newer phones, such as the C702, C902 and W760. The first and early software revisions of this platform had been bashed for not being all that responsive, and generally quite unstable. It seems like most issues have been dealt with, but mainly in all other phones than C902. I noticed several bugs with the C902; one was when I tried transferring a bunch of photos via Bluetooth, and the menus were taking several seconds to open. I tried it out later, though, and it was working just fine – odd. The overall speed with the C902 is unfortunately also a tad slower than in other phones based on the same software platform. It is by no means as bad as it was with the first K850 software revisions, but nonetheless it’s an annoyance factor, and hopefully it can be fixed.
The interface is visually impressive, and can portrait whatever you may desire, although the limited screen size on C902 makes it a little less joyful. The C902 comes preloaded with five themes. You’d think there’d be a bit for everyone, but they’re generally quite dark with the exception of one rather boring theme. Luckily, thousands of high quality themes can be downloaded for free on lots of theme websites, i.e. eSeth.net. You can even create your own theme, if you’re into that.
The menu layout can be altered according to your likings. You’ve got a total of four layouts to choose from – these are; Grid, Rotating, Single icon, and Theme. The first one is the default layout, and is probably also the one most users are accustomed to. The second is a bit more interesting, although it’s also a bit slower in use, because you’ll have to go through a circle of menu icons. The single icon layout is basically a list of the menu icons. This one is also significantly slower in practical use. The last one enables any theme-defined Flash Lite menus, and activates this menu layout.
One of the features I like most about Sony Ericsson’s feature phones is the activity menu. It is unfortunately also one of the features most people tend to forgot about, although it is capable of a lot. The activity menu is basically a pop-menu that allows you to see recent events, such as phone calls, messages, and calendar events, browse and manage running applications, have access to a bunch of user-defined shortcuts as well as your collection of bookmarks.
I’ve commented on the new soft key layout in previous reviews, so I won’t go into much detail about it. It works just fine, and previous owners of older phones won’t have much of a hassle settling with the new layout. After some time, I quickly found it better and faster in general use.
Applications
The C902 comes with two Java applications pre-installed. These are Face Warp and Photo Mate. Face Warp is a rather fun application that some might have tried earlier on, as it’s been pre-installed on a few other Sony Ericsson phones. The name of the application basically speaks for itself – you take a picture of someone (with or without the application) and you can apply several warping filters. Photo Mate is a perfect application for newcomers. It basically teaches you about using the camera in your phone, and shows what it’s capable of doing with before and after shots. The application includes a total of nine “lessons”, although you’ll have to download some of them from your phone if you want to make any use of them.
The file manager is just absolutely brilliant. It sorts the files by type, so your camera shots are in one folder, your pictures in one folder, music files in one folder, and so on. The file manager is also tabbed so you can switch between the read source (all, memory card, and phone memory) the displayed content. It works really well. The file manager is capable of performing most standard tasks, such as copying files, marking several files, renaming, moving, create folders, and so on. You can also send files directly from the file manager via Bluetooth, e-mail, MMS and – in some cases – SMS, or make use of the menu links to edit the content (pictures and videos).
The calendar is good for creating detailed appointments and reminders with notes, and searching through your calendar entries. It can display the calendar in a few ways – day, week and month. It automatically makes all Saturdays blue, and Sundays red to separate these from the rest.
It is possible to sync your calendar and various other data via either SyncML or Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync.
Other organizer features include a well-working set of alarms, ability to create tasks and notes (and put notes on the desktop), timer and a stopwatch. It’s also got a memo feature that allows you to store any information you’d like kept secret on your phone.
C902 also comes with a few localization services, including Google Maps. It generally works well, although it’s obvious you’ll need an external GPS to make use of all the menu items.
The Media application holds most of your media on the phone, including photos, music, videos, games and web feeds. We’ll leave you with a few screenshots for now, and talk about it later on in the camera and music parts of the review in a bit.
Camera
C902’s camera sports a resolution of 5 mega pixels. It also features auto focus, and it comes with a special flash on the back, by Sony Ericsson dubbed Photoflash. This kind of LED flash is without comparison the best I have ever seen – it is really powerful, and only requires a short exposure, so you won’t get as blurry photos as you would have got with a normal LED flash. Another thing I like about this flash is that it doesn’t drastically change colours in photos taken in bright daylight, and the flash somehow got fired. Had it been a xenon flash, it would have made the daylight photo look like it was a night photo. That doesn’t happen with the Photoflash LED.
The camera interface in C902 is by many a well-known interface. It works great, and it’s easy to use. You can easily switch modes, or access the settings, while still having the viewfinder in the background. There is ‘a but’, though. The interface is generally somewhat sluggish, which makes it no different from the overall interface speed experience. Hopefully this can and will be fixed in future software updates, as it’s just plain annoying to wait 2-3 seconds for menus to appear when you want to send your photos via Bluetooth, or 3 seconds for the camera to load.
The following camera settings are available, of which most are available in video mode as well.
In addition to these menu settings are also eight shortcuts around the display for switching between modes (camera, video recorder, and preview), focus settings, shoot mode settings, scenes settings, self-timer and flash settings. These are generally very responsive, and their placement makes them easy to use.
Now, let’s have a look at some of the best photo samples I managed to get out of the C902.
In terms of details, most people should be pleased with the C902, especially if the conditions are good. If the conditions aren’t good, and the lighting is bad, you will without doubt be disappointed with the C902. Although the flash is better than regular LED flashes, it simply cannot match a proper flash when it comes to freezing a photo.
As you’ll notice in the samples, there’s not really anything wrong with the details, it’s simply a matter of software.
And when it comes to software, C902 falls to the ground. The camera software is simply not good enough, and it’s really not good when it comes to dealing with light and in some cases also colours. Photos often come out over-exposed and with faded colours. I have also noticed software issues with the shutter speed, as well as the post-processing, which can make photos look worse than they did before. The noise reduction part of the software is not great either.
Having said so, the software is still better than the one in K850, and C902’s photos are most commonly a tad better than the ones from K850 in good lighting conditions. In bad lighting conditions, K850 will win solely because of its xenon flash.
Videos are recorded in MP4 format (H.263 codec) in QVGA resolution, 320 x 240 pixels. C902 records at a video bitrate of approximately 450 Kbps, which is a rather high bitrate for this resolution. The framerate is officially said to be 30 frames per second – we measured 28-29 frames per second, so that’s accepted. You can play a video sample below, if you’ve got QuickTime installed. If not, it can be downloaded here by right clicking and saving the file.
Your snaps and videos can be viewed in the Media application by either changing from camera/video mode to view mode, or by accessing it from the main menu. In here you can browse all the content, pass it on to friends and family, add tags, zoom in on photos, view photos on a map, if they’re geo-tagged (triangulation method only), edit photos and videos, apply the PhotoFix corrections, or view your photos in a slideshow.
Music
The music player in C902 is basically the Walkman 3 player without the branding and a few gimmick features, such as SensMe and Shake Control.
C902 supports decoding of audio codecs such as MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, RealAudio 8, and several WMA versions. Most needs will be covered, although some will be left with no support for their favourite codec.
The user interface is similar to the Walkman one, which means it is slick, quick, and easy to use. You’ve got a few settings to mess around with, including equalizers; play modes, stereo widening, and auto rotate settings.
I don’t think the majority of potential buyers would have any problems with using the C902 as their main music player. I’m sure it could replace lots of stand-alone players, as it offers a decent sound quality (with a nice set of earphones!). If you want to use it as your primary music player, you should probably look to get a better set of earphones and possibly also a larger memory card.
The built-in FM radio is another great feature of the C902. Graphically, it’s not as impressive as the one in the latest Walkman phones, but the difference shouldn’t mean that much to you. You can use the radio whenever the phone is connected to a headset or any other accessory that can act as the radio antenna.
On the C902 you can automatically store up to 20 FM radio frequencies – these are stored with whatever information is set available by the radio stations, with the C902’s built-in RDS support. This means the phone can show the name of the radio station, the name of the song playing, and lots of other info texts, if supported by the stations. RDS will also automatically update the frequency if a better one is available. This all works well.
One of the coolest features about the phone and lots of Sony Ericsson’s latest phones, which is also available when the radio is turned on, is the TrackID service. It basically records a small bit of a song, uploads it to a special server, and after a few seconds, you’ll be redirected to a website with the song information, if the song you recorded was in Gracenote’s huge database. The accuracy of this service is really high, and it’s a very nice free feature, although you might have to let go of a few pennies in data transfer costs if you haven’t got a data plan.
Games
The C902 comes preloaded with three Java games.
Café Solitaire combines no less than twelve solitaire games, including Klondike, Freecell, Spiderette, and Pyramid. To be honest, I wasn’t really excited about this at first, but I then realized that it’s really quite comprehensive, and it’s not bad looking either. I also realized that it’s more than just a cards game; you can actually create your own character, customize it and make it represent yourself. To make it all just a little bit more interesting, you can play the game with friends, win points, and upgrade your café.
Foto Quest Fishing is all about taking spectacular photos underwater photos of all kinds of fish. The game is played at Paradise Island, and you’ll be given your photo assignments by beach-owner Ula, who’ll also be your judge when it comes to the quality of your photos, how many fish you’ve managed to get in the frame, if there are any disturbing objects, etc. It’s actually a cool game, although I would have liked it if it was played in landscape mode, and you could use the actual camera shutter key to snap the photos in the game.
Need for Speed Pro Street is a really nice 3D racing game that makes use of the built-in accelerometer in the C902. This means you can steer the cars either by the d-pad or by moving, tilting and playing around with the phone. This way of gaming is rather nice, and seems intuitive for most, although it takes a minute or two to get the hang of. It can not only be played in portrait mode, also landscape mode, which generally works better for racing games. This also helps a bit on C902’s relatively small display.
Web browser and connections
C902 is a quad-band GSM phone with EDGE support, as well as support for the 2100 MHz UMTS and HSDPA networks. No love for America in this one, it seems. In terms of Bluetooth connectivity, C902 supports Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR, which means you’ll get fast data transfers around 140 kilobytes per second. It’s also got support for the A2DP profile, so you can stream music wirelessly in stereo via Bluetooth.
You can connect the phone to your computer via Bluetooth or USB. In file storage mode, you’ll get the fastest connection for file transfers. There’s no infrared connection support in C902.
The web browser is the good Access NetFront, version 3.4. Although it generally performs rather well, we’d still prefer Opera Mini any day. Like Opera Mini, NetFront 3.4 includes a mouse cursor which makes it so much easier to browse websites. There’s also a nice full size overview feature included, so you can pan around the sections of the website you’re visiting.
NetFront 3.4 supports CSS, HTML, xHTML, and light Javascripts. It cannot display any Flash content.
The homepage in NetFront 3.4 is a custom one, created by Sony Ericsson. It provides easy Internet searching (Google), a URL bar, links to your RSS feeds, browsing history and your bookmarks.
If you’re visiting a website that supports RSS feeds, such as this blog, you’ll be notified with a small RSS icon at the top of the browser window. You can then add the RSS feed, if you want to subscribe to it. It’s that simple! If you don’t like to go to the RSS feed menu each time you want to check your feeds for updates, you can place the feeds directly on the standby screen, and set it to automatically update every one hour or whatever time interval you may set. It’s a brilliant solution.
Like many other Sony Ericsson phones, the C902 supports most common e-mail services, including Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail, although you’ll have to manually set up everything yourself (either IMAP4 or POP3), if you choose not to make use of Sony Ericsson’s web-based set-up.
Contacts
The C902 has got room for up to 1000 contacts, and 7000 numbers in total. I don’t think I have heard of anyone with more than a thousand contacts in their phonebook. Each contact can be saved with the following info entries;
Name
Number (Mobile, Mobile (private), Mobile (work), Home, Work, Fax, and Other)
E-mail (up to 3 e-mail addresses)
Web address
Picture
Contact-specific ringtone
Voice command
Work information (Title, Company, Street, City, State, Zip code, and Country)
Personal information (Street, City, State, Zip code, and Country)
Info (a note)
Birthday (can be added to the calendar)
In my opinion, that should be more than enough for most. All of this can be synced with your computer, or sent wirelessly to another phone via Bluetooth or alike. You can of course also create your own business card with your contact details, and send this to fellow workers or whoever you may want to send it to. Again, this can be done via Bluetooth, e-mail, MMS or SMS.
C902 offers contact backups, so you won’t have to worry if you ever lose your contacts, one way or another. It is possible to set up a set of nine speed dials, and of course also contact groups, if you’re looking to send a message to all your buddies at work or your entire family at once.
Messaging
You can send and receive both MMS and SMS text messages on the C902. The phone is also capable of handling your voice calls and messages for you, although I haven’t tried this.
Both the MMS and SMS message editors are simply ingenious. The T9 dictionary – and the use of it – is also miles ahead of any other solutions on the market, period! With support for EMS, you can also add picture smilies, sound effects, animations, and small black/white pictures in your SMS messages. If you’ve set up a set of templates, or want to use one of the default ones, you can also quickly add one or several of these without ever leaving the editor. You can also add a large variety of special symbols; make use of copy/pasting; change writings options, such as the writing language, dictionary, word predictions and word suggestions. If the word you’re trying to write is not in the dictionary, you can of course add it to the dictionary, and you’ll never have to think about it again.
Calls
Calls can be made by either dialling a contact from the excellent built-in phonebook, or by dialling the phone number on the standby screen. If you choose to do the latter, the C902 will also automatically search through your list of contacts for any usable information based on the key combination you’ve pressed, as well as act as a completely regular phone. Confused? Let’s do an example.
I’m looking to call someone, whose number happens to be in my phonebook. As I press the following key combination, the C902 will automatically search and filter the entire database of contacts based on my inputs; two (for ‘C’), six (for ‘o’), and six (for ‘n’). So, basically we’ve just entered what could be part of a phone number, but we’ve also just searched for any contacts matching this certain key combination – in this case my test contact entry named “Contact”. It’s bloody clever, and it works a treat, although it may get a bit slow if you’ve got lots and lots of contacts.
You can do regular voice calls as well as video calls on C902. I haven’t tried out the video call part myself, as I simply don’t use it on a daily basis, but the voice call part is very good. Because C902 features two microphones, the audio is of high quality. The earphone call volume is sufficient for me, and I didn’t notice much noise on the line either, which is good.
I haven’t experienced any network reception problems during the review period.
The call manager holds a total of up to 30 calls. In my opinion, the call manager could easily have been enhanced a bit. It would indeed have been nice to check the length of a call, or at least to also include when the call ended.
Calls are separated in four tabs, one for each kind of call, based on whether it was an incoming or outgoing call, and if it was an incoming call, if it was missed. The first tab in line – yet the last to be spoken about – works as the overview-tab.
Conclusion
The C902’s main disadvantages lie in the hardware lacks. There’s no GPS, and there’s no WLAN support. On the camera side of things, there’s no xenon flash either, although in its defence the LED actually does a good job. The last few things would be its somewhat small display, and the lack of support for American 3G networks. Apart from this, we’re talking small software issues, that can be resolved in future updates.
I quite like everything else about the phone. Its build quality and quality feel is just amazing, it supports all European networks, it features speedy Bluetooth transfers, it works very well as a phone, and it’s got a decent camera as well.
I find the price of C902 pretty fitting. It’s lower than the initial price of K850, although it is a slightly better phone
The battery would generally last about four days of normal use. This seems like a nice battery performance, and it should be OK for most.
When it all comes down to it, is it recommendable? It depends. If you’re a heavy texter, then no – you’ll end up hating the keypad. If you’re in search of an advanced camera phone, you might want to wait a few months for C905 instead. This will be a bit pricier, but it’s also a lot better. If you need a camera phone now, C902 should do fine.
If you’re simply looking for a phone capable of doing a bit of everything, I think C902 could be a nice choice, although there would be many other alternatives in that category.
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.
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
No WLAN
Poor camera
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Not only are there flashy effects as a standard part of the user interface, the W890i also comes with 5 different themes (Bronzy, Clarity, Musaic, Purple sky & Walkman) where 3 of them include Flash Lite menu layouts – that’s Bronzy, Musaic and Purple Sky. I personally prefer the Purple Sky theme as it includes a really nice menu look with cool transitions. All menu layouts sport a 3 x 4 icon grid and sadly not something like on the W910 where there are three layouts to choose from. Expect the menu layouts to be an option to choose from in future firmware updates, though.
The wallpapers are also Flash-based so if you have your music playing, the song details will automatically be displayed on the wallpaper.
The operating system in W890i is the OSE-based A200 developed by Swedish Enea. A200 is the most fully featured software platform in any Sony Ericsson feature phone and it can be updated with many more features than it currently holds. This is also planned to be done in the future (TV-out, WLAN and advanced media handling) but for now the prime focus is to get rid of bugs and optimize its performance. While W890i feels like a stable product there are a few minor bugs reported. I have however not experienced any problems with W890i during the test period whatsoever.
People upgrading from older Sony Ericsson phones may notice that the back-key has disappeared. This is due to the new software platform based on a 3 soft keys. The left key acts as an option-key, the middle key acts as the action-key for confirming actions, while the right key acts as the back-key.
Another thing people will notice is that there are now two dedicated call keys to handle incoming and outgoing calls. The activity menu short cut key is still present and takes you to Sony Ericsson’s unique activity menu with short cuts to various features, new events, running applications and your web short cuts and bookmarks.
Very smart phone-ish
As former mentioned, W890i offers an extensive menu of activities. This is actually more advanced that what most smart phones has to offer, and Sony Ericsson has to be given credits for this brilliant multi-menu. With support for multiple applications running at once, we’re getting more and more close to entering the smart phone-sphere.
W890i is one of the first Sony Ericsson phones to include positioning services. This means that Google Maps Mobile is included and so is positioning software for use with extra GPS accessories. Google Maps Mobile works brilliantly on the W890i because of the 3G / HSDPA connections available with W890i. This removes any lags when loading maps in the application. One must be careful when using this application and the positioning services in general as they do include large data transmissions.
Only one Java application comes with the W890i. It is called Music Mate 4 and is a music composer application. You can choose from a large number of musical instruments, beats and tunes – once you’re done you can start making music! Here is where I miss the accelerometer in the W890i. W910i – a music phone with a built-in accelerometer – has also got Music Mate 4 pre-installed and the application works with the accelerometer in W910 so you can swing your phone around and it’ll make sounds and tunes according to what direction you move the phone in.
I think a weather application and possibly also the Gmail Java client would be very nice to see pre-installed on the W890i.
The 11th menu icon holds the organizer menu. This is where you’ll find the file manager, alarms, applications, video calls, calendar, tasks, notes, remote synchronization, timer, stopwatch, a simple calculator and a code memo application that acts like a password-protected storage of personal information.
The file manager holds all files on the phone. It is separated into 8 folders according to the content, plus an extra one called ‘Other’ for any files that don’t fit into the other folders. You have several ways of viewing your content in the file manager, and it is possible to perform various actions as well. You can manage your files, send them (picture message, email, blog or via Bluetooth), you can print your photos, you can rename, delete and mark files. The file manager is Sony Ericsson’s feature phones is without doubt one of the best on the market and is on par – and in some cases even better – with the standard file managers on most smart phones.
You can set up to 5 different alarms and it is possible to make them recurrent, meaning that you can set them to alarm on a number of repeating days. Alarms can be saved with notes, different alarm signals and even an alarm picture to scare you out of bed!
The calender application works a treat and pretty much does what it’s suppose to do. You can view your calendar entries by date, week or month view. Appointments are created with information about the subject, start time, date, duration, location & description. It is also possible to set a reminder. If it’s a recurrent appointment, you can set that as well.
You can set up a remote synchronization account on the phone. The phone supports two account types – SyncML and Exchange ActiveSync. I personally do not have any accounts, but it is said to work fine.
Tasks & notes can be created on the phone. Notes can also be shown in standby which works really nice. Tasks work as you’d expect. Likewise, there is nothing spectacular about the timer and stopwatch feature.
The calculator is very simple to use and can display up to 9 digits. It can multiply, divide, substrate and add numbers. It can also perform percent calculations.
Media is of big focus on the W890i and all other phones based on this operating system. An application called Media is to be found in the main menu. This application holds all photos, songs and videos on the device, with future plans of adding extra content such as games, RSS feeds & online TV shows (YouTube!). The user interface is very much like the one on the PSP and is a breeze to work with. There are nice transitions and cool effects in the different media browsers.
In Media Settings you can change the display mode – either portrait mode or landscape mode. Unfortunately there is no accelerometer in W890i so it doesn’t feature automatic display mode changes. In future firmware revisions we should also see TV-out support in selected phones from the Media menu.
The camera disappoints
The back of W890i sports a 3.2 mega pixels fixed focus CMOS sensor camera – unfortunately. Unfortunately because the camera does not feature auto focus, so you’re doomed if you want to do close-ups or want to do nice portrait with high levels of details – or any kind of photos with high level details. Furthermore, W890i lacks a photo flash for taking pictures in low-light environments.
The camera interface looks nice and is extremely easy to use. It takes no time to figure out how things are put together and where the various settings are to be found. As you might have guessed the camera interface is also highly animated and includes small effects here and there. It all works brilliantly!
If you haven’t got time to go through the menus to reach the appropriate settings, you can use the default keypad short cuts. You can check out the different short cuts in the picture above. If you do want to check out the camera settings, this is what you can mess around with;
Shoot mode – Normal, Panorama, Frames & Burst
Picture size – 3 MP (2048 x 1536 pixels), 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.
Sick of settings? Let’s get on with some samples photo by the W890i. Click to enlarge. Photo samples will be up ASAP!
Photos are often very well saturated and colours are very much like reality, which is obviously a very good thing. However, the photos lack sharpness and details. Most of the time large amounts of details are blurred all together, i.e. if you take a picture of a grass lawn or a tree, you won’t be able to separate many leafs from great mass of blur. If you want to take photos of something without lots of small details (like a building), the camera does OK. The noise reduction in the phone performs above average and helps a bit in low light situations. W890i supports Photo Fix to fix small light and contrast issues in your photos, and it works pretty well in about 50% of the cases.
You can also record videos on the W890i. Videos are encoded in MP4 format with AAC audio coding. W890i delivers up to 30 frames per second videos in QVGA resolution (320 x 240 pixels). The quality is generally acceptable but far from brilliant. You won’t be able to use it for much other than showing your friends on the phone or sending in an MMS message. You can download a video sample below (right click and save). Video sample will be up ASAP!
You can browse your captures easily from the camera menu by changing from camera mode to preview mode. The photo viewer is excellent and has lots of cool features such as the brilliant X-Pict Story slide show feature with different mood songs, effects and transitions. You can tag your photos and have them sorted nicely that way. Photos are also sorted by month which is actually a nice way of having the photos organized.
Music phone 3.0
The new features in Walkman 3.0 compared to earlier versions is the improved user interface and the addition of features like SensMe and the ability to sort music by genre and year. Another nice addition is the fact that audio books can now be used with the Walkman player easier and same goes for podcasts which can be handled on your computer with the bundled media software.
W890i supports lots of common audio codecs, such as M4A,MP3, AAC, AAC+, E-AAC+, WAV & WMA. Equalizers can be set to enhance your music and with 4 presets and the option to manually set an equalizer you should have more than enough to fiddle around with here. If you decide to minimize the Walkman player while listening to music, the song information will be printed on the wallpaper of the phone. Furthermore, when you play your music on W890i, the keypad illuminates according to the mood of the song. That looks very neat!
The audio quality on W890i has to be among the best I’ve heard. The bass level is nice and deep, and the sound is generally loud and clear. For me, the W890i audio quality is definitely better than the W910’s audio quality.
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. Other features include the ability to repeat and randomize the song tracks on your play list.
One of the features the W880 lacked was an FM-radio tuner. Sony Ericsson has fixed that with the W890i and also added the addition of RDS so you won’t have to bother about losing the radio signal. Up to 20 radio frequencies can be saved automatically and are then displayed in a list view for easy browsing. W890i displays standard radio station info texts. If you like the song on the radio, yet you don’t know what the name of it is, you can use the TrackID service to record a short sample and have it sent to Gracenote’s huge database to receive an answer only seconds later. If your operator supports it, there will also be a link to buy the song.
The Sims on your phone
Three games are bundled with the W890i: Lumines Block Challenge, Sims 2 and Tennis Multiplay. The last one is a 3D game and is probably also the best of the bunch, but let’s have a look at them all.
Lumines Block Challenge is a puzzle game, where the object of the game is to match up falling blocks and create patterns. It might take a while to fully understand the purpose of the game, but it’s actually a pretty decent game when you figure out how to play it.
Sims 2 is a mobile version of the extremely popular ‘The Sims’-series games. It actually works out all right on the phone but it is very limited compared to the computer / console versions. In the mobile game you can only do a limited amount of purchases and upgrades before there’s nothing more to buy or more people to meet. This is a bit of a let-down as it’s a very nice simulator game. The graphics is pretty simple but far from bad and the gameplay is quite good.
Tennis Multiplay is the only 3D game on the W890i. It’s probably the best tennis game out there for mobile phones and it’s really a fun game! You can play tournaments and singles in order to upgrade your player’s skills. If you want to improve your gaming skills you can also do a few training sessions. The graphics looks quite good and it’s easy to play the game.
Enhanced web browser
W890i is a Quad-band GSM phone with EDGE, UMTS & 3.6 Mbps HSDPA-support. Furthermore it has Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR (transfer speeds at about 140 KB/s) and it supports A2DP for streaming stereo audio via Bluetooth. I’ve tested this with a MBS-100 and it worked just fine. It supports USB 2.0, which works quite fast in USB mass storage mode. There is no infrared connection on this phone.
Access NetFront 3.4 is the mobile web browser in W890i. However, it has been significantly enhanced compared to the same version in phones like K850 and W910. It now includes a mouse for easy navigation and generally it seems a whole lot more fast! It does mobile websites as well as fully featured HTML websites without any problems. It supports light Java scripts, but no Flash support is present. It has a built-in Google search feature as well as a link to Sony Ericsson’s music store called m-buzz.
If the website you’re visiting supports RSS-feeds, you can add the feed to the phone’s built-in RSS reader. Once you update the RSS library, the feeds can be shown on the standby screen.
I had some problems setting up my Gmail email account on W890i (for some reason it simply wouldn’t work), so I quickly downloaded the free Gmail Mobile application. W890i supports IMAP4 and POP3 protocols.
Phone book works great
With room for up to 1000 contacts and a total of 7000 numbers I have my doubts if anyone will ever make use of all that room for phone numbers. 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. This is actually quite brilliant and has saved my life quite a few times.
One of the best things in W890i is the Smart Search feature. Imagine you’d have to go through a list of hundreds of contacts just to find one number. Those days are over with Smart Search. If you want to find my contact entry in the phone book, you’d simply have to type “6, 4″ for “M, i” and my entry would pop up as well as other entries where this number combination fits (this could be Michael, Nick, etc.). It also works with telephone numbers, so if you were to find the number “123456789″, you could simply type in “1, 2″ and it would pop up.
The phone book in W890i is simply brilliant and outperforms most of the competitors.
Messages
You can create MMS and SMS messages on the W890i as well as voice messages. Both the MMS and SMS editor is superb and this is an area where competitors can only dream of getting close to Sony Ericsson’s ease of use and features. You can add smilies, tunes, pictures and animations to your SMS messages with EMS support. The T9 dictionary in Sony Ericsson phones is known as probably being the best and most extensive in the world. If a word is not in the dictionary, you can add it yourself, and the phone will remember it from that day on.
A few MMS & SMS templates are on the phone and you can of course add your own. Messages can be saved on either the phone memory or the memory card.
If you go in to messaging settings on W890i, you’ll probably be overwhelmed by the many settings. Not only does W890i support all the normal features like message receipts, it also triumphs with some really cool features like requesting an answer and what message type you want to use.
Calls & calls management
To call somebody simply type in their number or find the contact in the phone book and then press the green call key. Once you’re done with the call, press the red end key to end the call. This is how the new system works on A2-based phones. Older Sony Ericsson phones used the soft keys to handle calls, and I quite liked that way, but this new one seems better.
The sound quality during calls is good. The volume is quite high and you can put it on speaker if you want other people to listen as well. It seems like there is no noticeable background noise during calls.
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. However, if you’ve called a contact more than once, only the most recent call will be displayed.
Conclusion
Sony Ericsson W890i is a case of love at first sight. It’s a brilliant music phone and it has some nice features like the web browser, Media system, excellent phone book and messaging abilities. I have not experienced any serious bugs in the firmware and have only experienced one reboot – probably because it was running 4 applications at once.
Even though W890i seems like a well connected device, I would still love to see the addition of WLAN on it. Luckily, Sony Ericsson has plans of releasing a WLAN accessory, so if this accesory is priced right, I can’t blame the Swedish-Japanese company.
The pricing of W890i isn’t bad. At the moment you can get a W890i for FREE with 100 Anytime minutes, 300 texts for about £20 per monht AFTER cashback.
Batteries in thin phones are often not that long-lasting, so I of course had my doubts about the battery life on W890i. However, I had no reason to doubt it! It lasts about four days on a full charge. A performance I am more than thrilled about.
W890i is a brilliant buy and I can highly recommend it to anyone out there. Can I please keep my review model, Sony Ericsson? Pretty please…
The Nokia N96 has 16GB internal memory which can be expanded up to 32GB using a memory card. I have to admit that after owning an N95 8GB and reading the initial specs for the N96 I wasn’t convinced that it would provide much more. I’m happy to say I was wrong. It has similarities but it appears to be a much better phone. Just before release it was announced that the UK version of the N96 would support the BBC iplayer. This is the BBC’s seven-day catch-up application. You can watch all the top BBC programmes on your mobile for free. This is an incredible feature, especially with the Nokia N96’s kick stand and 2.8 inch screen. It can sit on your desk while you catch up with the latest EastEnders or Holby City. You’ll never miss an episode again and you can watch them any time. The music capabilities on the N96 are equally as impressive. The 16GB memory means it can store loads of music, really loads. You can sort and select by pre-defined playlists, artist, album or genre. Music can be downloaded directly to the phone from the Nokia music store or you can transfer music files from your PC or Mac. The N96 also has a stereo FM radio with RDS. There’s a 3.5mm audio jack for plugging in your favourite headphones or you can use wireless stereo Bluetooth headphones. The media capabilities of the N96 are superb.
I was sceptical at first but I’m now convinced that the new Nokia N96 is enough of an evolution for existing N95 8GB users to upgrade. The BBC iPlayer is a wonderful addition. Then there’s the extra memory, which is expandable to 32GB, the new N-Gage compatibility, the nicer design and all the little improvements too. This is a brilliant phone.
