Sony Ericsson W960i

By Damian Koh

The Apple iPhone won't be making its way to Asia until 2008 (at least not officially) and the launch date is at best an obscure moving target. For some, it means waiting patiently. For others who don't subscribe to that school of thought, there are already alternatives in the market they can consider and one of them is the LG Prada Phone. While the Sony Ericsson W960i isn't a full touchscreen phone (nor is the Prada anyway), it is the closest thing to an iPhone killer we've seen so far. We managed to wrestle a prototype unit off the Swedish-Japanese manufacturer to take a closer look.

Design

Like we've mentioned, the W960i isn't a full touchscreen phone and for heavy texters or people who prefer hardware buttons, that could be a welcome relief. What we didn't expect was that the alphanumeric keys would be bunched tightly together (as you can see from the pictures) with minimal spacing between each rectangular block.

On our prototype unit, it seems like the keys are made from thin plastics attached to the main body. Each of them is capable of rocking forward/backward and sideways like a balancing act. We're not sure how that would affect daily use and we're holding our comments until we have a full commercial unit.

Between the generous 2.6-inch QVGA touchscreen panel and the numeric keypad is a row of multimedia playback touch keys. These allow us to play/stop, fast forward, backtrack or skip music tracks. Alternatively, the jog dial on the left edge of the phone does the job of scrolling through tracks or playlists. What's missing is a Back button to accompany the dial. Although there's one on the numeric keypad, it isn't as convenient because the thumb will have to move back and forth between the two.

Like the Cyber-shot K850i, Sony Ericsson has adopted a glossy black fascia for the W960i and soft-touch plastic on the rear. In our hands, the W960i feels very sturdy and the rounded edges give a wholesome feel to the unit.

Features

Sony Ericsson's W960i claim to fame other than its touchscreen LCD and its announcement during the iPhone launch hype is its 8GB of onboard memory. That works out to approximately 2,000 MP3 files of about 4MB each, which technically is more than what the average user will listen to over a few days. All that looks very promising. The W960i belongs to the Walkman pedigree that most consumers have come to embrace as one of the better music-phones around. Most importantly, it isn't Sony Ericsson's first time releasing a phone.

The handset's menu is very similar to some of the touchscreen model's we've seen like the M600i and the P1i. Menu options that appear on the bottom of the 2.6-inch screen change according to the different settings. We got away using our finger or thumb on the panel most of the time, but typing a text message via the onscreen keyboard still requires a stylus. The latter is stowed away on the top left corner of the unit.

Because there's no directional keypad or joystick on the W960i, navigating the Walkman interface requires the use of the jog dial. The menu icons are lined in a column that looks vaguely like the Sony PlayStation Portable with the usual sorting by artists, albums, compilations, tracks and playlists. More interesting is the Moods option where songs can be tagged to the different tempo of the music, for example, happy, sad, energetic or chilled. So we can pick one that suits our mood for the day.

Although it's from the Walkman series, the W960i isn't a minion when it comes to digital imaging. It has a 3.2-megapixel autofocus camera with built-in photolight. There's also a secondary front-facing camera for 3G video calls.

On the connectivity front, the triband W960i is also 3G-enabled (UMTS 2100) and equipped with Bluetooth with A2DP support and Wi-Fi. There's no dedicated 3.5mm or 2.5mm headset port, though, which is a pity. Other features on this Symbian Walkman include FM radio with RDS, an Opera Web browser, support for RSS feeds, TrackID and organizer functions.

Outlook

Sony Ericsson rates the W960i for 9 hours of talktime and 15.4 days on standby. It comes in Vinyl Black and is currently available at S$998 without contract.

Source: Cnet