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Sony Ericsson's flagg ship for music
2007-11-30 16:40

Next week Sony Ericsson will start selling their music mobile W960. With a durable touch screen and a well developed music player it should be able to compete with Iphone. We have tested it.


W960 will be marketed as Sony Ericsson's top model in the music segment and among the great strengths is the built in memory of 8 gigabyte (coresponds to approxemately 2000 songs).

The music player of W960 is no doubt both good and graphically elegant. On the top of the keaypad there is a Walkman button and when pressed switches to the Walkman mode. Then all of a sudden three touch buttons starts glowing right below the touch screen. Those are the buttons for for play/stop, next track and previous track. After one has done whatever one wish a press on the walkman button again will switch back the phone to where it was prior the walkman mode. For instance if one was reading SMS before the press of the Walman button a second press will bring back the same SMS. This is a practical solution.

For input of numbers the phone has an ordinary numerical keypad, but for text input it is also possible to write with the hand on the screen.

When it comes to sound it feels ok for the naked ear, but here the phone does not show off. We have run W960 through a special sound test and compared with other music mobiles and the result of that test will be presented in our December issue of Mobil.

One of the biggest difference between W960 and other music mobiles is the touch screen. One navigates by clicking on the screen and with the scroll wheel on the side of the phone. The new screen is harder than for instance the one on the Sony Ericsson P1 and touch screens from HTC's Windows mobiles. In such way the screen is more durable and pocket friendly, but because of that I also perceive the screen to be a bit more unresponsive as well.

The camer delivers pictures that clearely feels better than the average mobile phone, especially outside thanks to the autofocus. But the lack of real flash and a tad weak LED makes indoore pictures not that briliant.

The WEB browser in W960 is Opera, with good rendering of WEB pages and good connection with the RSS program etc. The calendar and the address book is also very good.