Introduction
It happened that we have received the list of new phones from XXL GSM, where we have happily noticed Sony Ericsson W595. We haven’t reviewed it yet and the manufacturer has been in the background on our site lately, but now we finally have a new model. I have asked them to lend it to me, the package has arrived, I have taken the phone out of it and I have immediately felt that I won’t see much new things over here.
W595 resembles W910 not only in its design, but when looking at its features we again discover only minor differences. It has been more than a year ago that I had W910 in my hands and now I have its repacked clone, so the first thing I did was to check the prices.
Well currently W910 costs €15-€20 less than the subject of this review. So no we have a double question: what do we get from W595 that hasn’t been in the former phone and how much will the handset’s price drop in the coming weeks. I don’t know the answer for the second one, but this review will probably answer the first one.
Hirdetés
Exterior, box
Anyway, this is a more graceful phone than the bit behemoth W910. The design is a bit fresher; it’s a bit trendier and more youthful. Its shape, however, is not much of a new thing: the handset is rounded on top and the bottom and has a trapezoid shape from the side when it’s closed. The chrome stripe running along this trapezoid spices up design quite a lot, just like the bit redesigned mass of navigation keys, which has a quite harmonious shape, made up of all kinds of arcs and circle-shaped motifs.
The sliding provides a feel of premium quality, the cover has no play to the sides when opened, and just a tiny bit in the vertical direction, but the general assembly quality is very impressive, even though everything is made of plastic besides the previously mentioned silvery surface. This is even truer for the back cover, which practically has to be torn off from the phone, it even bends dangerously during the process, which seems a bit troubling, considering its thickness.
The dark grayish handset tries to become a bit more unique by using some light blue motifs, the musical control parts of the circle-shaped navigation key have such a backlight and the back of the opened phone’s cover is painted light blue as well. This surface is made of metal for sure. On the left side of the phone we can see only the uncovered data connector, the volume control keys and the Walkman hotkey are on the right.
The slider’s numeric keys are simple, but easy to use, they might be a bit too soft, and the pressure point is very close at the same time, which is quite strange, but not a problem. There are no bonus keys above the display now, there is only a very small hole which has the secondary camera behind it.
Menu, basic functions
Well, what could I say? The menu has zero new features and before we could say that this is due to Sony Ericsson’s platform being such genially refined and unsurpassable, I’d like to tell you that in the case of C905, which is already being tested by us; the engineers were somehow able to improve lots of things. It’s a pity that they weren’t in the mood when designing W595.
A menu with icons, themes, quick menu that we can edit, unambiguous use, but nothing phenomenal is characteristic of the interior. We can see the same phonebook that we were seeing for years, the tons of information is displayed on a tabbed interface. The maximum capacity is 1000 names with 7000 extra information.
There are no, but really absolutely no changes in messaging. SMS, MMS, email, just what we are used to. Long-time fans of the manufacturer won’t be disappointed, but they won’t see any astonishing new features either, everything works as it used to work. I had the feeling I used to have in the school canteen when we had sponge biscuits with cocoa: it’s good, it’s good, but we had this so many times, could we have it once at least with vanilla topping for example? I would even be okay with the raisins…
Our dear readers might get excited when I say that it’s time for the PIM functions that always have tons of fun. Well, well, here’s a calendar that at first glance (and at second, and third, and…) looks just like on the previous 30 Sony Ericsson handsets. Of course, it’s fine, it has month and week views, repeating entries, alarm and it even warns us of conflicts. What could be improved? Well, for example – it’s no shame to copy from a Sagem – we might be able to record entries with the voice recorder, or maybe (oh, sweet Jesus, this has been done by Alcatel) we could send preset SMS messages at a predefined time… The alarm clock, the calculator, the stopwatch, the countdown timer and the code memory are all the usual.
Multimedia
Yeah, we can observe the first notable difference from W910, the resolution of the camera on the back has grown to a stunning 3.2 megapixels, which is a really great and phenomenal performance, even more that the Walkman series still lacks autofocus, congratulations. This can be seen on the images, they are horrible. Blurred, faded and really ugly photos are the result; the 3.2 megapixels, the landscape mode and the usual set of options are completely useless for such a quality.
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I probably don’t even have to say how much more professional the musical part is. The multimedia menu is available in this Sony Ericsson too and finally the motion sensor has a meaning, so when tilting the phone to the left the screen is rotated. This is true for photo and movie viewing too, and of course for the music player as well.
The headset – this time – is not an in-ear one. The arm of the earpiece is light blue and it reads “Bass reflex”. It really has an outstanding quality. When the headset is plugged in we can access the equalizer from the menu, the manufacturer probably felt this option completely useless when playing music via the handsfree speaker and I can understand them: a mostly plastic phone can provide some really weak audio performance without a headset.
The Walkman menu has the usual functions like podcasts, sorting tracks by ID3 tags, displaying album covers, running in background, playlist support.. it has all the things we would ever need. The RDS-capable FM radio is really just a bonus to all this, just like the TrackID feature, so we won’t be disappointed by W595 in terms of music, but this is expected from a Walkman handset.
Software, data transfer
There are four games on the phone (Extreme Air Snowboarding, Guitar Rock Tour, QuadraPop, Racing Fever GT), which provide fun for some time. The list of non-gaming software includes a step counter (it has no extras, it just counts), a unit converter, a world clock, a program for viewing YouTube videos, a comic creator (this is quite lame, it spices up photos with effects and then we can put funny graphics and speech bubbles on them), a Music Quiz and here is the well-known Music Mate, which sounds all kinds of musical instruments.
The java version of Google Maps is also here, but the phone has no GPS receiver, so the program can estimate our current position based on cell info and it locates us on maps that are downloaded from the internet. As you can see the phone requires web access for all kinds of small things, so it’s no wonder that it supports GPRS, EDGE, UMTS and HSDPA networks as well.
The browser is the usual, it has landscape view and can break pages by width, but Opera Mini is still better. We can use stereo Bluetooth 2.0 and USB 2.0 at local level, a USB cable is included in the package. A 2 GB M2 card is also included in the box, this has to be inserted into its slot under the back cover (the battery doesn’t have to be taken out, but we still have to fight for the slot access). W595 works for two days with one charge, that’s the capacity of the 950 mAh Li-Ion battery.
Summary. Is the phone worth a couple of euros more than W910? Well it’s not worth it for the camera, but all other things are absolutely subjective. The design is fresher, but this won’t be enough for now. But if its price will drop a bit and will cost at most as much as the previous model than it W595 could be a viable option. Although we didn’t see a trace of evolution in this handset, it’s of course still not a bad phone and it’s price will surely drop, so on the whole it’s:
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| Sony Ericsson W595 |
Bog
Translated by Szaszati
Specifications
| Sony Ericsson W595 | ||
 | General | |
| Technology | GSM, UMTS, HSDPA | |
| Size | 100 x 47 x 14 mm | |
| Weight | 104 grams | |
| Available colors | gray, white, blue, black | |
| Display | ||
| Display diagonal | 2.2” | |
| Display resolution | 240 x 320 pixels | |
| Display type | TFT | |
| Number of colors | 256K | |
| External display | none | |
| Memory | ||
| Phonebook capacity | 1000 | |
| SMS memory / max. MMS size | dynamic / 300KB | |
| Internal memory | 40MB | |
| Memory expandability | M2 (2 GB card included) | |
| Data transfer | ||
| Frequency bands | 850/900/1800/1900 MHz | |
| GPRS / EDGE | Class 10 (4+1/3+2) / Class 10 (236.8 kbps) | |
| UMTS / HSDPA | present (384 kbps) / present (3.6 Mbps) | |
| IrDA / Bluetooth | none / 2.0 (A2DP too) | |
| WiFi | none | |
| USB | 2.0 | |
| Push-to-talk / RSS | none / present | |
| GPS receiver | none | |
| Basic functions | ||
| Profiles | present | |
| Vibra function | present | |
| Built-in handsfree | present | |
| Voice dialing / voice commands | present / present | |
| Sound recorder | present | |
| Alarm clock | present, also when turned off | |
| Predictive text entry | T9 | |
| Software | ||
| Platform | SE | |
| WAP / HTML browser | present / present | |
| E-mail client | present (POP3, IMAP4, authenticated) | |
| Java | present, MIDP 2.0 | |
| Games | 4 | |
| Currency converter | present | |
| Extra software | Google Maps, VideoDJ, PhotoDJ, MusicDJ, TrackID, | |
| Multimedia | ||
| Main camera | 3.2 megapixels, fix focus | |
| Secondary camera | CIF | |
| Video recording | present, QVGA | |
| Music player | present, can run in background | |
| Equalizer | present | |
| FM radio | present - RDS | |
| Battery | ||
| Main battery | 950 mAh Li-Ion | |
| Standby time | 385 hours | |
| Talk time | 540 minutes | |
| Other | ||
| motion sensor | ||
