Accessories, exterior
The first Sony Ericsson Walkman phone has been launched in early 2005, this has been W800 that had about 30 (according to my calculations 32) W-series successors, which means 8 new handsets per year. I have recently started to have a feeling I had a while ago about Motorola RAZR; new Walkman phones are being pumped out; high-end, mid-range, entry-level, all sectors have a Walkman, which does no good to the brand name, but the price of course won’t change. Last week the latest phone arrived in our office, it’s called W395 and its attitude towards improvements is like mine towards breeding horses. FYI: it’s not interested in it.
The handset came in a mid-sized box which had mostly air inside, as we won’t get anything with the phone besides the charger, a 1GB memory card and a headset made of two parts. As for the headset I’d like to note that it’s not an in-ear type, and although it can be taken apart, there are no buttons on it, so we can control music playback only with the phone’s keys – that’s all that remained of the Walkman legacy, it’s really sad.
The device is currently available in two colors, grey and purple, I of course had the second one, as this is the only color I just can’t do anything with. (We had the option to choose between white and purple, but this one looks better on pictures - Bog) The materials have somewhat made up for the visual shock, as the front panel of the 96 x47 x 14.9 mm large W395 (weighing 96 grams) is made of the lacquered plastic we’ve already seen on S302. The back panel is just plain plastic, the part that can be taken off is a bit thin and it’s slightly wobbly, but what should we expect nowadays of a Walkman phone that costs 135 euros…
When taking a look at the pictures we could notice that the “new” phone looks just like the gaming-gyroscope thingy called F305, launched in January. Of course we might ask why W395 is a Walkman besides the labels and the more advanced music player, but since I don’t really know the answer, let’s move on and stick to the facts. On top of the front panel we can see the speaker, while below that there’s the 2” TFT panel with a resolution of 176 x 220 pixels and I can only say positive things about this. Image quality is great, even in spite of the resolution, the colors are bright, texts can be read in sunlight as well, and according to official info the plexi is scratch-resistant, which seems to be true. Below we can see the main controls, we probably know the layout already, but the button that launched games on F305 has a new feature after the “walkmanization”, it takes us to the music player. In order to emphasize that this is a Walkman, the f-way d-pad has the seek and play/pause icons engraved on it and on the bottom we can see a nice little Walkman logo.
Compared to F305, the creative designers have been spiced up the back panel with two purple stripes and a Walkman logo, so we have the same 2 megapixel camera with fixed focus and the two gratings that look like speakers. On the left there is the charger/headset connector, on the bottom there’s the microphone, on the right we can see the camera’s shoot key and the volume control keys, while the top part is taken up by the M2 card slot.
The handset’s sliding mechanism is quite good, the numerical keypad appears after a nice sound. The keypad itself, however, is not the best I’ve seen, the pressure point is messed up a bit, and it’s easy to mistype. If we rotate the phone when it’s open we can see a part filled with purple stripes, so it’s quite evident that the purple edition is made for the ladies.
Menu system, software
The handset’s software is from Sagem, which means that it’s incredibly fat. We can access the main menu by pressing the center of the d-pad, here we can see a grid of 12 icons which is easy to use even for those who don’t really know the manufacturer’s phones.
Let’s see what the menus have inside. There’s entertainment in the top right corner, which offers three demo games (NitroStreet Racing, Guitar Rock Tour, Sudoku), TrackID, the video player specialized in MP4 and the sound recorder. In the third row we can see the file browser and the FM radio.
In the last row there’s the organizer, which comes with an advanced alarm clock, a calendar with month and week views, a to-do list, a timer, a stopwatch and the basic calculator. In the applications folder there are two Java software, the quite nice 3D world clock and the unit- and currency converter. As you might have guessed from the previous sentence, the handset has Java support, we can store these applications on the 15 MB internal memory.
Data transfer, phone calls
I had no problems during calls, sound quality was okay and I had no signal problems either. Typing was difficult, as it has happened quite frequently that for example I wanted to type a “b” – which means I have to press the 2 key twice – and instead I’ve got two “a” letters instead, which is evidently due to a software bug.
We can store 1000 contacts in the phonebook, all of them having about 20 fields, including a photo, a ringtone and the birth date. The size of the SMS memory remains a big question – storage capacity is displayed only in percentages and I didn’t start counting – while MMS messages are stored on the 15 MB internal memory. In the call log we can have a look at dialed/received/missed calls on the same list or separately.
The phone has a quad-band GSM module working on 850/900/1800/1900 MHz. There aren’t many data transfer protocols supported, there isn’t even 3G, thus we can stick to GPRS and EDGE, while the Openwave web browser won’t be stunningly great, but it’s fine for having a look at a couple of important things. There is Bluetooth support at version 2.0 and stereo sound is supported as well.
Multimedia
The camera has a resolution of 2 megapixels and fixed focus. The highest available resolution is 1600 x 1200 pixels for images and 176 x 144 pixels for videos. The camera’s software supports image sequencing (not BestPic, just the simple one), we can turn on night mode or the self timer, we can set JPEG compression quality and white balance and we can spice up the photos with a couple of effects.
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The quality of the images taken by W395 has been much better than I’ve expected, as opposed to previous Sony Ericsson handsets with fixed focus, we cannot only take pictures that look like heavily filtered oil paintings. The camera’s view angle is larger than usual for mobile phones and the colors are bright too. In turn the pictures are a bit blurred and the dynamics range is quite low, there were lots of areas burnt in on the photos.
One would expect a lot in terms of music from a Walkman phone, For example an FM radio, which is fortunately included on W395, so we can check that. The music player is also okay, it can run in the background, it has an equalizer, it displays album covers (although in a very small size) and it can filter tracks by ID3 tags. Another checkmark.
The headset, however, is not as good as it should be. It’s not the in-ear type that made the Walkman brand great, but it’s a simple one, which has a good sound quality, but not as good as one would expect from a Walkman. Unfortunately the cable is asymmetric, I personally hate these. The connector is a 3.5 mm jack, thanks to the lengthener that has a record button and it’s a microphone as well, but it has no playback control keys at all. W395 has quite a good sound quality on handsfree, I could say it’s better than I would expect from such a size and the plastic case – still, there are better solutions even from SE.
Battery, summary
The battery has a capacity of 950 mAh, so it can keep the new Sony Ericsson online for about 3-4 days if we don’t listen to music, but this time span decreases if we use the music player, if heavily used it might not stay online for more than 2 days.
I have mixed feelings about the new Walkman phone. It basically looks good, but the new design is far from being really new, it’s enough to mention W580 as an example. It’s well-assembled, but the lacquered front might frighten a lot of people, just like the simple headset. Okay, I can see why won’t such an accessory make it in the box of a low-end device, but please: W395 is not an entry-level phone, or if it is, then it’s highly overpriced, as we currently have to pay 135 euros to get it. W910i has the same price and it has a QVGA display and HSDPA support, or I could mention W580 which is 20 euros less, and… well it has the same features, but it has a higher resolution display and a better headset. Oh and I didn’t even mention W880 for 100 euros – yeah, W395 is good stuff, but not with this price-tag. We can only hope that its price will soon drop to about 100 euros – or even below – and then it will be a good buy.
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| Sony Ericsson W395 |
Bocha
Translated by Szaszati
The handset has been provided by the manufacturer’s national representative, thanks!
Specifications
| Sony Ericsson W395 | ||
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General | |
| Technology | GSM | |
| Size | 96 x 47 x 14.9 mm | |
| Weight | 96 grams | |
| Available colors | Grey, purple | |
| Display | ||
| Display diagonal | 2” | |
| Display resolution | 176 x 220 pixels | |
| Display type | TFT | |
| Available colors | 262.000 | |
| Memory | ||
| Phonebook capacity | 1000 | |
| SMS memory / max. MMS size | ? / 300 KB | |
| Internal memory | 15 MB | |
| Memory expandability | M2 (1 GB card in package) | |
| Data transfer | ||
| Frequency bands | 850/ 900/1800/1900 MHz | |
| GPRS / EDGE | Class 10 (4+1/3+2) / Class 10 (236.8 kbps) | |
| UMTS / HSDPA | none / none | |
| IrDA / Bluetooth | none / 2.0 (A2DP too) | |
| WiFi | none | |
| USB | 2.0 | |
| Push-to-talk / RSS | none / none | |
| GPS receiver | none | |
| Basic functions | ||
| Profiles | yes | |
| Vibra function | yes | |
| Built-in handsfree | yes | |
| Voice dialing / voice commands | no / no | |
| Sound recorder | yes | |
| Alarm clock | yes, also when turned off | |
| Predictive text entry | T9 | |
| Software | ||
| Platform | SE-Sagem | |
| WAP / HTML browser | 2.0 / yes | |
| E-mail client | yes (POP3, IMAP4, authenticated) | |
| Java | yes, MIDP 2.0 | |
| Games | 3 demos | |
| Currency converter | yes | |
| Extra software | TrackID, 3D world clock | |
| Multimedia | ||
| Main camera | 2 megapixels, fixed focus | |
| Secondary camera | none | |
| Video recording | yes (H.264 format, 176 x 144 pixels) | |
| Music player | yes, also when turned off | |
| Equalizer | yes | |
| FM radio | yes - RDS | |
| Battery | ||
| Main battery | 950 mAh Li-Pol | |
| Standby time | 480 hours | |
| Talk time | 8 hours | |
| Others | ||
| Walkman | ||
