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…

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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.

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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.

A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!