Sony Ericsson W960 Review
Similar to Apple’s iPhone, the Sony Ericsson W960 sports 8GB of on board memory and a 2.6″ 262k color, QVGA resolution touch screen display. This means up to 700 albums worth of music can be stored on the device and navigated with the new Walkman Touch player. Bluetooth with A2DP stereo headset support is also included to allow wireless enjoyment of your music. Sony Ericsson’s TrackID feature has also been beefed up in the latest Walkman range, with detailed information on artists and albums being delivered with the touch of a button.
Music isn’t the only trick up the W960’s sleeve though, as built in WiFi connectivity allows for high speed web browsing and email. Out of range of a wireless hotspot? The W960 also includes UMTS 2100MHz 3G connectivity and tri-band GSM/GPRS. Imaging is also easily handled with the 3.2MP auto focus camera, and since the W960 is a UIQ smartphone, all you PIM data is available as well. What is even more surprising is that all these features are housed in a phone only 16mm think and weighing just 119g.
The Sony Ericsson W960 Walkman phone will be available in select markets from Q4 2007.
Key features:
- Walkman Touch music player
- Symbian OS 9.1 with UIQ 3.0
- 3G support with video calls
- Wi-Fi support
- 3 megapixel camera with autofocus
- 8GB of storage space
- Dedicated touch-sensitive player keys
- 262K color TFT touchscreen display
- FM radio
Main disadvantages:
- Not as impressive in life as in the promotional photos
- Slow interface response as storage gets nearly used up
- Back key location changed
- No memory card slot (yeah, we know it has 8GB of internal memory)
- Music player cannot sort tracks by filename
- No EDGE support
The Sony Ericsson W960 is the successor of Sony Ericsson W950, which came with 4GB of integrated memory, but failed to gain popularity for the lack of camera and Wi-Fi capabilities. In fact, featurewise the W960 resembles more the Sony Ericsson P1 - they are almost identical in terms of hardware (although the P1 has an Infrared port, which lacks in W960). The W960 features the same 208MHz processor and the same amount of RAM - 128MB. However, the W960 boasts a dedicated Walkman key, three touch-sensitive keys for controlling the music player and, finally, that all-important Walkman home screen application with fullscreen visualizations.
