First impressions of Sony Ericsson W960i

W960 is marketed as the new top model of their Walkman line of music mobile phones, and one of its strengths is the built-in memory at 8 GB, which corresponds roughly to 2000 tracks.

The music player in W960 is definitely good, and elegant graphically. A Walkman button is placed at the top of the keyboard, and with a push, the phone switches over to Walkman-mode. Three touch buttons light up at the bottom of the screen. Play/stop, previous and next tune. After you have done what you wanted in the music player, push the Walkman button again and you're back exactly where you were before. So, for example, if you were reading an SMS when you first pushed the Walkman button, you will be back in the same SMS. Quite a handy solution.

For number input, the phone has a normal numerical keyboard, but for text input, you can also use handwriting on the screen.

Soundwise, the phone sounds OK, but surprisingly it doesn't excel in any way. We ran the phone through a sound test program, and the result came out OK but not great.

One of the big differences between W960 and most other musical oriented mobile phones is the touch screen. You navigate the phone by pointing at the screen and using the scroll wheel at the side of the phone. The touch screen has a harder surface than the one on Sony Ericsson P1i or Windows-mobiles from HTC, to name a few. That makes the display less sensitive to scratches, but we also feel it makes the screen slower in responding to touching.

The camera produces better than average pictures for a mobile camera, especially outdoors, thanks to the autofocus. But the weak LED-lamp and lack of a real Xenon-flash makes it less suitable for indoors photography.

W960 is fitted with a web reader from Opera, which is good at rendering web pages and at handling RSS flows. The phone also has a really good calendar and address book.