Sony Ericsson's
flagship Walkman phone offers a wealth of features: it's a 3G
SmartPhone with a 3.2 megapixel camera, video recording and a
Walkman music player, video calling, , an FM radio, email, web
browsing, Bluetooth and WLAN connectivity and 8 Gbytes of user
memory.
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large screen and always on 3G connectivity make mobile web
browsing and email a reality. The Opera web browser is supplied
pre-installed, and a document viewer and editor is available
for working with attachments. These features combined with the
touchscreen user interface make the W960i into a powerful
business tool that can start to compete with the likes of
Blackberry. In fact, Blackberry Connect can be installed,
enabling push email and contact synchronisation. As the phone
runs Symbian, there are literally thousands of applications
available for download.The Ericsson W960i is Ericsson's
flagship Walkman phone and is an upgraded version of the W950i.
It's a 3G smartphone running the Symbian OS and has a touch
screen display in addition to a normal keypad. It's a large
phone and quite heavy too, yet it retains a classy elegance,
and is quite a usable phone. At least the size does enable the
LCD display to be large (2.6 inches). The keypad is easy to use
and the touch screen feature works well. In addition to the
touch screen menus and the numeric keypad, the phone also
supports handwriting recognition using a stylus.
The predecessor to the W960i came without a
camera, which many thought was a major omission. Sony Ericsson
have fully taken this on board and the W960i has a powerful
camera: 3.2 megapixels with autofocus and an LED flash. It lacks
the more powerful xenon flash found on Sony Ericsson's flagship
Cyber-Shot phone, the W850i, but is nevertheless one of the
better camera phones on the market. The camera can also take
video clips, and 3G video calling is available too.
A stereo headset is supplied with the phone,
and you can optionally purchase a Bluetooth headset to listen to
your music wirelessly. In addition to the music player, the
W960i has a built-in FM radio with RDS. The W960i is a Walkman
phone, so let's look at the music capabilities first. The first
thing to point out is that the W960i has a fixed memory, so you
can't add a memory card, but that shouldn't be a problem as the
memory is a whopping 8 Gbytes. That's enough to store around
2,000 high quality MP3 tracks, and is more than most rival
phones can offer even with memory cards added. The touchscreen
interface is at its best when using features like the music
player, as you can literally touch the album art of a song to
select it. It makes the music player even easier to use than an
iPod Classic. With the Walkman 3 music player you can play,
rewind, fast forward, equalise, shuffle tracks and create
playlists. There's a dedicated key for starting the Walkman
music player. Software is supplied for transferring music from
your PC and for ripping tracks off CD's.
The W960i is a very powerful device with
outstanding music capabilities and a good all-rounder in other
respects. It would have been nice to see a HSDPA-enabled
implementation of 3G, but the ability to connect to Wi-Fi
compensates for this to some extent. It would have been nice to
have quadband too. It also has a tendency (like all Symbian
phones) to sometimes be a little slow and shaky, especially when
running applications. Nevertheless, the W960i is in many ways
outstanding, and it's only because it's so good that these
issues are worth pointing out.
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