Sony Ericsson W960 is aptly the big gun in the Sony Ericsson portfolio of music-centered handsets. Gifted with the scorching 8GB of storage space and a large touchscreen TFT display, a 3-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi and 3G capabilities, the W960 easily stands out in the Walkman crowd. Powered by the Symbian OS and UIQ user interface, it delivers one-of-a-kind Walkman experience with rich fullscreen visualizations and advanced track filtering. All this is enough to have us drooling over the specs sheet, eager to get our hands on this smarty Walkman and see what it's made of.
Design
The model comes in one single color scheme – Vinyl Black, where the front fascia is composed of black glossy plastic, which is extremely prone to fingerprints and grease. Furthermore, it has been covered with a protective plastic screen, which surely doesn’t make for a less smudgy looks. Unlike the P1i the display found in the W960i is not recessed into the casing, on the contrary, it sits flush with the surroundings. The side plates employ white matte plastic – frankly speaking, the color mix is pretty much bog-standard. The rear is made of black soft-touch plastic, and feels velvety.
Judged on its materials alone, the W960i seems to be pretty decent, but looking at the way they are combined in here, we are not particularly pleased. Let’s put it this way - it looks prosy. Altogether it leaves an impression of a cheap phone, and it definitely doesn’t stand in one line with the previous offerings from Sony Ericsson for this price-bracket design-wise. It even somewhat reminded us of the Sony Ericsson T300i (released long ago, there was a story with plastic supplies for this phone) in terms of the plastic it utilizes.
Measuring up at 109x55x16 mm and weighing in at 119 grams, it is almost no different from the P1i, meaning that you can carry it as you please. It would seem that the same controls layout is a pretty much consistent solution for the W960i, but not this time – the maker has turned the things upside down on this front. The left-hand side no longer houses the Return button, since it has moved to the front plate. In fact, this new layout will prove convenient only if you don’t really need the JogDial, since when separated, these two control elements are pretty much useless. Basically, this JogDial+Return couple is designed to let you manage the device with only one hand.
But in the case of the W960i, this is no longer possible. In other words, everyone who has been using Sony Ericsson’s solutions for years (the P-series, or the M600i and the W950i) can well kiss their previous experience goodbye – it doesn’t make any sense in the new model. Being a seasoned user of Sony Ericsson-branded phones, I can say that not only is it fiddly and awkward to use, such layout delivers a knock-out blow to the handset’s ergonomics.
Obviously, my reflexes tell me that I shall find this key somewhere around the JogDial, but it is not there anymore. We could easily overlook this letdown, if only new users were able to handle the W960i single-handedly. However, even they have to use both hands to move about the device.
Display
The W960i and the P1i enjoy the same display type, at least that’s what occurs to you when looking at their specs. It is a QVGA resolution (240x320 pixels) display measuring 2,6 inches from corner to corner (39x53 mm), 262 K colors. Comparison of one and the same image displayed tells us that the brightness and contrast parameters are even. However, the W960i’s performance is marred by the protective glass, which slightly reduces the picture’s brightness and somewhat distorts the colors, but this doesn’t make all the difference in real life situations.
The screen can hold up to 14 text and 3 service lines. Information is fairly legible; fonts can be adjusted to your liking. The W960i does well in the sun, when indoors it outputs crisp and color-saturated picture. Yet setting it against displays with smaller diagonal, you will surely notice that its image quality is inferior – even the Samsung D900i puts up a richer picture (or the Motorola Z8).
Keypad
The W960i comes with a conventional number pad with cramped button, but thanks to their size and the area they occupy, this keypad is a cinch to type with, even though, to my liking, these buttons could use some deeper travel. There is the dedicated Walkman key for starting up the player, and right above the number pad there are three touch-sensitive keys just like on the W950i. All buttons are lit in pretty dim white, which is still enough for most environments.
Interface
The Sony Ericsson W960 interface is UIQ 3.0 - a customizable stylus-based user interface for mobile phones, based on the Symbian 9.1 OS. The interface is the same one used in previous Sony Ericsson smartphones such as the W950, the P990, and the P1. With W960 however, the Walkman functionality is on focus.
Probably the biggest update is the ability to change the well-known Today screen with a Walkman one. When the player is inactive, you have a big Walkman shortcut right in the middle of the screen. Once you get your music playlist rolling, the home screen will visualize every detail about the currently running track plus its album art. The most definite eye-catcher of all is the fullscreen visualizations.
Taking our eyes off the player (a bit of a challenge, really) we must duly note that the home screen also offers information on time, date, signal strength and battery meter and, of course, there is the customizable shortcuts bar. It can hold up to 15 different shortcuts to your favorite features. The shortcuts bar is cleverly only a touch away, so that it doesn't consume the precious screen real estate (much like on Sony Ericsson P1). The shortcut items have large graphic icons, aptly sized for finger touching.
Using the Sony Ericsson W960 in everyday scenarios like making calls, managing contacts and listening to music was a pleasant task. We do miss the side Back button, which enabled single-handed operation of the interface. The best thing about the new home screen is that the old one is still an option when you use your smartphone to run everyday jobs. In case you opt for it, the Today screen will display the current Calendar events, messages and emails, missed calls, general notes, etc. With the Today screen on, the four top shortcuts of the bar we mentioned earlier appear at the bottom.
On the standby screen, there are two pop-up menus. The first one can is launched by pressing the More softkey and the second one can be opened by touching the triangle in the upper left corner. While some of their functions overlap, the first one offers the option to turn on a connectivity feature, change the ringtone volume, view the smartphone status, and allows access to a call management option for filtering incoming calls. It's here that you can also access the Task manager. The other pop-up gives you access to the most important items or actions you may need or like to do - for example, you can again turn on connectivity options such as Bluetooth or WLAN, make a new call, add a new contact or put down some appointments and notes. Furthermore, it gives you access to the dual time zone clock and allows you to control the volume level for different events centrally. We are very pleased with this menu, as it allows quick access to the most important functions of any smartphone. The only downside is that it's only accessible with the stylus.
A nice thing is that the smartphone has a dedicated Flight mode, which can be turned seamlessly on without restarting the phone. Starting the handset directly into Flight mode is another option, which you get prompted about every time you power it on. The main menu of the Sony Ericsson W960 allows two different views: icon grid and list view. The font throughout the user interface is rather small, except for the file manager, messaging and phonebook, where you can choose between there different font sizes. The smartphone interface is customizable through various graphic themes - unfortunately, ours had only the default Walkman one preinstalled.
Make contact
The Sony Ericsson W960 offers an extensive phonebook designed to suit everybody's needs. It can store unlimited amount of numbers. You can choose to filter your contacts by groups or by saving location; and group them into individual folders, which you can later use for call management. The details you can save for a given contact are plenty and include several numbers and email addresses, job title, office and home postal addresses and voice commands for the different phone numbers of the contact. Finally, you can associate a ringtone and a picture to a specific contact. There is a field to enter the contact's birthday and the entered date gets synced with the Calendar. Much like the smartphones based on S60 user interface, you can add your own custom fields here, too.
Call management
The Call log lists store all the information about the calls received or made. Now, when it comes to call management, besides call filtering there are two other nice things that the W960 can do for you. The first one is sending an SMS with a predefined text to the person whose call you are rejecting. The second one is automatically storing a callback event in the calendar every time you reject a call. In case you opt for that, you can set how many minutes after the call the call back reminder should appear.
A touch of messaging
Usually the messaging department is among the strengths of any smartphone. Sony Ericsson W960 is not an exception to the rule. It offers rich functions combined with several text-input options. You can enter text using a virtual on-screen QWERTY keyboard or simply handwrite with the stylus on the touchscreen display. As regards handwriting recognition, the phone manages very well. The Sony Ericsson W960 also offers an enhanced version of the T9 dictionary - its thesaurus is expandable - you can add your own words and it can even remember whole messages.
All messages share one inbox. The supported types are SMS, EMS, MMS, and RSS feeds. The last one is available through a dedicated application. Emails have their own separate Inbox for every single account. Composing messages is nice and easy with the different input methods available. Use of emoticons is enabled, should you feel short on words. The font size can vary according to your needs. A lot of editing options are at your disposal, too.The email client is not really a separate application. It has extensive options but setting it up to work with your email account is quite easy. It supports the POP3, IMAP and SMTP protocols, as well as SSL and TLS encryption. The W960 has support for various push email providers - the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync comes preinstalled. Writing an email is as simple as writing a standard SMS. By default, the client downloads only the email headers or you can set it up to automatically download entire messages if they don't exceed a predefined KB limit. Adding an attachment is easy as usual - all you have to do is open the corresponding tab in the "new email" editor.
Camera
The Sony Ericsson W960 is equipped with a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus and a dual-LED flash - again, much like the P1 and unlike the previous Walkman-enabled smartphone W950. The maximum resolution is 2048 x 1536 pixels. Pictures are taken by holding the handset in landscape mode. The camera interface is intuitive - all settings are arranged in a toolbar at the bottom of the screen. In fact, the snappy camera interface reminds a lot of the interface of the latest Sony Ericsson phones, with its similar graphics and functions. There are three quality levels and the camera has a full automatic exposure control, while offering nice manual overexposure control accessible from the main viewfinder interface.
The autofocus settings of the camera feature a dedicated macro mode. You can even turn the autofocus off and use a fixed focal length for even faster snapshots. The camera offers automatic white balance but there are four custom white balance presets to choose from, depending on the environment. You can apply several color effects to the pictures and video, such as Black & white, Sepia, Solarization and Negative. We will refrain from much comment on the picture quality, as we're convinced that the final, retail version of the smartphone will have the camera quality improved. Our unit (being a pre-release one) produced images with very high contrast and sharpness. So we don't find our samples satisfactory, so we'll not publish full-size shots. Instead, we post some of the better images downsampled to 1024 x 768 pixels. We expect that when launched, Sony Ericsson W960 will produce images as good as the Sony Ericsson P1.
Much like previous smartphones, the Sony Ericsson W960 can capture video with a maximum resolution of 320 x 240 pixels at 15 fps. There are S60 mobile phones on the market capable of recording video in VGA resolution at 30 fps while providing full smartphone capabilities. Obviously, QVGA and the low frame rate are somewhat of a downer. Lower resolutions (such as QCIF - 176 x 144) though, allow recording at 30 fps but the picture details are far than adequate. All videos are recorded in 3GP format. The video recording times (no matter what the resolution), are limited by the available memory only.
Conclusion
Summing it up, the Sony Ericsson W960 easily offers more than any other Sony Ericsson Walkman before. Positive changes compared to the W950 are noticeable both in system performance and in the hardware equipment. In terms of software, the handset is identical to the previous UIQ 3 mobiles and, when compared to Nokia S60 smartphones, loses only on VoIP capabilities, which are much more elaborate in the latest S60 mobiles.
The biggest controversy as we see it, when making the purchase decision for W960, lies in the use of a touchscreen interface for a regular smartphone. Our opinion is that a smartphone interface should be either optimized for finger touching or the screen should not be touch sensitive at all. Pulling the stylus out for anything except handwriting on the screen is not justifiable. So, just to put it shortly, the W960 would have been a great choice if it had some sort of a D-pad to allow easy single-handed navigation through the menu options without the need for stylus all the time.
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