Introduction

Sony Ericsson succeeded in making the Walkman brand popular again in two year’s time. It is to mention that this step was fortunate in means of business too, as they reached such a position on the market of musical mobile phones that other manufacturers can only dream of. Marketers at the company realized perfectly the potential in the brand, but they also took an even wiser step, paying much attention to make the best out of the phones, which is typical of the Walkman

I think I will never forget the W800i and our article about it. That was the first time we got two phones at the same time, and so an article worthy of the beginning a really successful series was born. This has been proven by the number of clicks too.

Anyway, we have only one W960i in our possession and even this had an adventurous way to me. It didn’t arrive through the regular channels, so I value it highly, since it won’t hit national stores before December. We get a lots of negative feedback for testing phones still in beta state (although I need to mention the last time we did this was two months ago with the K850i), but the W960i has an almost complete Hungarian software and it’s quite sure that the final version’s keypad will have a better makeup, although the one present on the test phone was quite all right too.

We already had a glance at the W960i at the national press preview and a lot of our readers have been eagerly waiting for the test so based on our own little survey there is quite a lot of preliminary interest shown for the model, which is not surprising since we’re talking about the phone with the most features from the Walkman series.

Exterior

It is clear, that the exterior of the W960i is simply great; its general rating of approval was quite high, at least according to my surroundings. Who knew what it was, tried to get one at once. It’s not a small piece but the Symbian-based phones from Sony Ericsson never were tiny phones, mainly because the 240x320 pixel size touch screen needs a lot of space, but in return it’s huge. The designers squeezed the numeric buttons too under the screen, even more they broke with the standard involving the presence of two letters on a button, present since the M600i, a change that I welcome a lot.

In spite of this, the phone crowded with buttons doesn’t have a perfect ergonomy. I think of myself as a man with an average sized hand, so I think a lot of you will experience what I did: no matter how hard the design tries to satisfy the needs for one-hand usage, when taking the phone into the right hand, you can’t reach, for example, the number sign key, as it is to be feared that the phone falls out of our hands. When writing a message I solved this problem by drawing a small line on the touch screen when I needed a space and this was recognized automatically.

However this wasn’t my greatest problem, but the fact that the “Back” button from under the lateral Jog-dial (which is still a world champion solution in the history if mobile phone usability) has been skimped, which is being missed by every P-series Sony Ericsson user. It’s bye-bye to one-handed, easy usability, as this button has been moved to the front cover, over the numeric keys near the Walkman’s quick-access button and the C function key. To complete the picture I must also say, that a W950i owner has been complaining about this button, since long-pressing it unlocks the keypad, so he, for example, is extremely grateful to the designers, as he has called different people with the phone being in his bag

Over the numeric keypad and the three function keys lies a touch-controlled area, which is used for controlling the music player and as a consequence these buttons are only active when the player is turned on. On the side of the phone, over the Jog-dial, is the loop for the neck strap or the wristband, which stands out quite strangely from the side of the phone. On the right side of the phone we can find the volume buttons, but not directly one over the other, as there is a panel between them (everybody wanted to push this, but it’s impossible) with the modest inscription: 8GB. Moving towards the lower right corner of the phone, the user bumps into the camera’s hotkey. The bottom of the phone is equipped with the usual Sony Ericsson data connector, over which a longish LED is visible. This LED blinks with the same regularity as on other phones from the manufacturer, or it just stays lit in red or green. There is a small power button on top of the W960i; the stylus can be pulled out from the top left corner. This is the part which got the most of the negative criticism, as it is absolutely thin, transparent, it can be bended with two fingers and it looks very fragile.

The back cover has a soft, silky touch. There is a huge round-shaped motif on the upper part, this includes the camera, the auxiliary light and a speaker which seems small at first glance but it has quite a decent size. The usual nonsense is that the phone, when put on the table, leans on the camera’s outer ring, so the first signs of usage have already appeared on the test phone.

Menu

A lot of people may have been waiting for a significant innovation in the W960i’s menu system, but it has been already known that this innovation did not happen. The phone is equipped with the same system as for example the P1i, so there is no notable change if we don’t consider the active desktop prepared for the Walkman functions and the renewed music player already seen in K850i and W910i.

The Symbian 9.1 operating system runs the UIQ platform usual from the manufacturer and it is currently at version 3.0. The speed necessities are taken care of by the 208 processor running at 208 MHz, which is sometimes just not enough. The 384 MHz core used by rival Nokia performs much better, but of course in the case of Sony Ericsson we must take into account the touch screen as an advantage, but to tell you sincerely it isn’t always a clear benefit. Opening messages takes the most time. Of course it isn’t critical, but as we have seen much faster models, the difference is notable.

The menu is constructed logically, although I have been a bit oppressed a bit by the need for both hands to use it. Almost every function can be accessed faster through the touch screen, but because of the phone’s size only by switching hands can the lateral wheel, the numeric keys and the different spots on the display be reached properly, one after the other. Just like in the M600i the function texts appearing on the bottom of the screen do not have a corresponding hardware button, accessing them needs the use of the touch screen. I would have preferred normal buttons to help using the phone instead of the music control keys, but a Walkman is a Walkman.

Anyway, the phone can be customized completely, themes can be applied, colors are changeable, the active desktop and other virtual hotkeys wait to be modified as we want it. I liked the task manager a lot, which can always be accessed from the top right corner. Switching between running tasks is very easy and closing a task is just two clicks away. This comes in handy sometimes because launched applications can only be minimized with the “Back” button; they keep running in the background. Fortunately I have never experienced any slowdown due to running multiple tasks. It happened that the camera, the calendar, the music player, the browser and the messaging service have been running together but if I don’t open the task manager I wouldn’t have even noticed it, so stability is simply brilliant.

Basic functions

The address book can be as big as the internal memory. Since this, in our case, is 8 GB large we can boldly start entering the full phonebook of Budapest; some space would still remain free. The system simply hates the SIM card; it is wise to copy our entries to the internal memory. Here we get a pile of data divided into tabs; every name entry can get a lot of additional information and the birthdays appear on the calendar too after a confirmation. In case of pictures associated with images there is a possibility to zoom in on a part of the picture, this way bringing closer the head of the person.

Message handling is professional. SMS and MMS messages are stored in the same folder there is no size limit on them, although national networks allow a maximum size of 300KB per multimedia message. However I couldn’t get used to text entry because of the strange layout of the keys, so I tried character recognition, but for this to work properly the stylus has to be pressed harder than normal and the virtual keypad is too tiny and I hate pin-pointing stuff. In turn the software capabilities are complete, we have copy-paste, text formatting, the system handles smileys, so everything’s cool on this part. The email client is easily configurable, I sent a 14 MB large email through 3G, the W960i solved without objection. Above all there is Exchange Server synchronization, which can be configured with the help of a wizard. If everything goes all right our business emails follow us automatically, but we can still add some spice by installing the Blackberry client software, as we have a possibility for this, too.

The calendar is just great; it works flawlessly on the UIQ interface, I’ve liked it at the Motorola Z8, too, which had a similar system implemented. It’s clean, transparent, has a lot of functions and it’s easy to use. The alarm clock remembers three points of time, but – and now I would like some stunned silence – the alarm won’t go off if the phone is switched off, only in flight mode. Okay, I know, this is a kind of sex-appeal at the P-series, but if the Motorola Z8 had solved it with a similar system, than in the case of a Walkman top model we can call it a shame without remorse.

Camera

It’s good news in any case that despite being a Walkman we can find autofocus on the W960i with the 3.2 megapixel camera. This wasn’t a habit at the manufacturer until recently, so we could give them a bonus point, but we don’t let ourselves smashed by the marketing machinery: this should be normal, not an extra. When taking photos it is advised to hold the camera horizontally, even when capturing shots to attach to names in the phonebook.

The settings are fully detailed and are constructed by the usual scheme. The lateral expo button focuses when pressed lightly, and exposes when fully pressed. There is macro mode, tons of preset schemes, frames, adjustable image sizes and quality, and there is a flash which can be considered quite strong among flashes found on mobile phones, but when taking a look at Sony Ericsson products, it is inferior to the K800/K810/K850 series which are built on xenon technology.

The pictures made with the camera (above) are not bad, mostly because this isn’t the main profile for the phone, but such a quality is the minimum from a 3.2 megapixel top model. At the press preview they were talking about DVD quality video recording, but if this is how a DVD looks like, then I won’t ever put one in the player, because it has only 15 fps and a size of 240x320 pixels. We won’t have problems with the storage place for a while. Although the phone cannot be supplemented with memory cards, the 8 GB space is still a considerable amount.

Amongst the applications there is a name card recognition software, we have seen this kind at the rivals’, maybe the Asus PDA phones had the best of these, there would be a lot to polish on the Sony Ericsson’s system. Although one of my experiments were made with macro, the phone still argued that it is too blurry. There is only one normal reaction from the part of the user in such a case: go to hell, you took the picture, why didn’t you focus better?

Music

The Walkman software version 3.0 can be familiar from W910i and K850i, with a menu of white text on black background, and the current menu item is surrounded by bouncing red dots. It’s quite a pleasant view, but there is no serious complaint to the software either, we can group an list our music in every way imaginable, except by filenames. This little flaw didn’t really bother me, but it was noted elsewhere. We can attach two types of information two every sound file, namely it’s mood, and a rating. After applying these attributes, our music collection can be grouped by them, too.

The sound quality without a headphone is a bit of a disappointment, nothing extra, it’s a fine job, but it never reaches heights like an Alcatel S853 or a Nokia 6290 and compared with a B&O Serenata it’s a junk, but it’s a known fact since a long time that a Sony Ericsson Walkman becomes a Walkman with a headphone. Although I didn’t get absolutely anything with the phone, the classical HPM-70 headset had the expected quality. I did not hear any background noise, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Theoretically the box will contain two accessories: a wired headset (the good old HPM-70), and a stereo Bluetooth adapter (HBH-DS220), in which any standard headset can be plugged in.

Of course the equalizer is present, and it has a Megabass function. During playtime, the album’s picture is seen on the display (if there is one), and the whole stuff runs in the background of course. This is when the music control touch keys between the display and the keypad are active, with them we can seek forward and backward and stop and star the music. The volume is controlled by the lateral buttons.

It’s worth to examine the display a bit. During playback there are animations running which can be dots, leaves, and things like this. Their rhythm is not the same as the music’s, but still, there is logic in their motion, because matched to music files with different moods, there are animations with different speeds and colors, which, of course, can be customized. The main idea in these animations (besides being spectacular) is that when the music player is in the background, then the animations continue to amaze us on the main screen, and in the center of the display appears the minimized Walkman application. The playlist is a wise thing too: when we’re busy in the player the lateral wheel pops up the window in which we can see the music files; it’s easy to jump between them. From this point-of-view this Walkman-king has completely gained my approval: it has a nice interface, has a lot of functions and its spectacular, too. Let’s see this in motion picture:

Data communication, battery

Let’s start with the usual sad things. It’s very positive that the W960i is capable of GPRS and UMTS connections but EDGE support is missing again, but in our little country two providers concentrate a significant amount of power in 2.75G. Compared to P1i it’s a change that the infrared is gone (I don’t miss it), so for local data transfer we have Bluetooth and the USB cable, both having version 2.0. We can achieve an incredible speed with the latter, we can fill up the 8 GB space within half an hour, the transfer speed is over 7 MB/s. The Bluetooth connection didn’t excel that much, we had the usual 60-70 KB/s speed.

By all means I have to mention that the phone has WLAN, which now supports WPA2 encoding. It worked flawlessly although the sensitivity could be a bit better, it could hardly see the hotspot from across the street, while all other gadgets have connected without a problem. The browser… well, there is much to improve here. Of course it has full HTML, but no Flash, and we can choose two types of views: broken to page width, and landscape. We can zoom in steps of 10%, but it’s not a Nokia Minimap browser, that’s for sure. Of course compared to a standard phone it’s really cool, but in comparison with the rivals’ similar phones it doesn’t perform as well.

The camera above the display helps us during video-calling and I have surprisingly good experience with this. Usually these secondary optics give quite an ugly picture but the W960i transmitted my face in good quality to my colleague Gubro even in a darker surrounding.

Of course I didn’t expect much from the battery under the back cover. It has a large display, it was constantly connected to 3G, both the WLAN and the Bluetooth functions were active, so no wonder that it passed out after two days. When the battery is running low on power, the LED above the data connector blinks in red, but even when the phone signaled an empty battery, it still went on for another 5-6 hours, in opposition with a Samsung for example, which gives up the work 10 minutes after the first signal.

In conclusion I have to say that the W960i is a good little machine. It’s far from perfect, I would never buy one of these for myself because it doesn’t match my hands, but the musical part is worthy of the Walkman name, the complexity of the Symbian operating system is another pleasant thing and the 8 GB capacity makes a lot of people forget that the phone’s memory cannot be expanded. The processor should evolve a bit and the absence of EDGE still hurts. It doesn’t have a real concurrent in the market because even if the N95 has a lot of functions, it’s not the same category and the N81 didn’t yet arrive..

Sony Ericsson W960i

Bog

Specifications

Sony Ericsson W960i
	Technology	GSM 900/1800/1900/UMTS
	Size	109x55x16 mm
	Weight	119g
	Display	240x320 pixels, 262 thousan colors, TFT
	Phonebook	dynamic
	SMS/MMS memory	dynamic
	Other memory	8GB
	Java	present
	Vibra function	present
	Calendar	present
	Alarm clock	present - only when turned on
	Calculator	present
	GPRS/EDGE/3G/HSDPA	4+2/none/present/none
	Push To Talk	none
	Infra/Bluetooth	none/present 2.0
	Predicitve text entry	T9
	Voice calling	present
	Sound recorder	present
	Voice commands	none
	Currency converter	present
	FM radio	present - RDS
	Built-in handsfree	present
	Main battery	900 mAh Li-Pol
	Standby	370 hours
	Talktime	540 minutes
	Camera	3,2 MP, QVGA video, flash, autofocus
	POP3 e-mail	present - authenticated
	WAP browser	2.0
	HTML browser	present
	Games	java
	Ringtones	MIDI, MP3, AAC, AAC+, WAV
	Operating system	Symbian 9.1, UIQ 3.0 platform
	MP3 playback	present
	Other	Touchscreen, stereo, BT, WLAN