Sony Ericsson W950i Walkman

Just the way a whole lot of peeps were waiting for the P990i to rock their world, an equal number of Sony Ericsson fanbois have been eagerly looking out for the top-of-the-line Walkman phone, the W950. Now that it’s finally here, let’s see if it is really worth the wait.

The Sony Ericsson W950i is the first Walkman-branded smartphone, running SymbianOS v9.1 UIQ 3.0, in the market. It is based on the M600i, which we reviewed (and weren’t terribly impressed by) earlier. In fact, the two devices are the same, with only a handful of differences between the two:

• a 4GB internal flash memory and no memory card slot
• a normal numeric keypad with T9, instead of a QWERTY keypad
• Walkman-branded phone, so it has extra media playback keys.
• FM Radio

Read the M600i review for more info on the general device, as we will only be focusing on the differences in this new Walkman phone.

Design

As mentioned, the device is the same as the M600i, so the physical dimensions and design of the W950i device is the same. The device has an iPod-ish form factor: it’s not too compact, but at the same time it isn’t uncomfortably huge, unlike the Nokia N91. The comparison to the N91 is inevitable because of the 4GB storage capacity in both the devices. The W950i is only available in one color: a dark shade of purple, called ‘mystic purple’. It looks brown, but it’s actually dark purple if you look at it closely.

The W950i sheds the full QWERTY keypad of the M600i and gives you a normal numeric keypad. The side columns of keys have been removed and now you only have a Walkman (or ‘media’ key) and a C key instead. The keypad is flat and sort of retro ’touch-sensitive’, comparable to the RAZR or the recent Samsung Ultra Edition 9.9, but unfortunately it is not as good as the former. It is not comfortable to type on, because the keys are a bit small and the lack of any border demarcations can make you accidentally press the wrong keys. The other problem with the keypad is that it’s of a very thin material compared to hard plastic keys on other phones, so the chances of the keys getting worn out, revealing the actual buttons underneath are very high.

There are media keys right below the screen of the phone: previous, play/stop and next. These aren’t visible when the phone is in stand by mode; they light up only when you’re using the phone. However, these aren’t dedicated keys, as the Walkman branding would lead you to believe. These are actually the 1, 2 and 3 numbers respectively that double up as those keys. The problem here is that, in normal phone mode i.e. the stand by screen, these will always work as numeric keys and key in numbers; you need to press the Walkman media key to go into Walkman mode and only then do the keys work as play/stop etc. There is another button on the right side of the phone that’s a dedicated play/stop button, which works regardless of what mode you’re in, but you can’t go previous/next unless you go into Walkman mode. This is inconvenient and I don’t think a lot of people who are used to the simplicity of the iPod are going to choose this.

Since the W950i is the same as the M600i, it has a large QVGA (240x320) touch screen and a bright orange colored stylus. The phone, being a UIQ 3.0 smartphone, also takes in handwritten input and presents an on-screen keyboard if required. It also has the jog dial that’s common to all UIQ phones. The jog dial reminds me of the Creative Zen Xtra that I had for a brief period of time. Music can be controlled using the jog dial in a very similar manner.

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Tech

The W950i is a tri band GSM (900, 1800, 1900) phone with GPRS and 3G/UMTS/WCDMA support. EGDE is absent, just like the M600i or P990, unless you manage to score a W958c from China. I have no idea why they would give China EDGE and not India. While at it, why not take away 3G and release a W1000 in 2008?

Local connectivity-wise you have Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0 and Infrared/IrDA. Just like the M600i, there’s no WiFi on the W950i, not that you need it in its segment.

Bluetooth on the W950i also supports A2DP so you can connect a stereo headset such as the Plantronics Pulsar 590A or the iTech Blueband for wirefree listening. When connected to an A2DP headset, the background visualization gets disabled for some reason. It doesn’t seem to be a technical limitation, I mean, what’s the use of the visualization if you’re going to keep the phone in your pocket or bag?

The USB cable for the phone comes with its proprietary Sony Ericsson connector. A mini-USB slot on the phone would have been a good thing, as most other audio players have it and it’s something that users are quite comfortable with. The phone also recharges via USB, which is a good thing. When connected, the phone shows up as a USB Mass Storage drive. Windows will go with its “New Hardware Found” ritual, but you don’t need to feed it any driver disc to avail of the USB MS functionality. When the drive shows up, you can simply drag and drop your music on it and pull out the cord when done. After transferring, you need to run the ‘Update Music’ option for the phone to scan through all the new tracks and sort the info into its database.

The W950i also comes with its Disc2Phone software that’s kind of like iPod’s iTunes, but not as usable. Fortunately, as mentioned before, you can simply drag and drop music so you don’t need Disc2Phone at all.

The W950i comes with 4GB of flash memory built-in to the phone. Compared to the N91’s 4GB hard disk drive, the flash memory in the W950i makes it more reliable and also consumes a lot less power than the moving parts of the N91 HDD. Out of the 4GB, around 3.8GB is actually usable. If you put regular 128kbps MP3s of 3 minutes each, you can store almost 1,300 songs, or 1,000 songs of 4 minutes each. The device plays back AAC, AAC+ and eAAC+, so you can encode your MP3s in those formats to make them smaller. I think you should be able to squeeze in at least 1,400 to 1,500 songs in the phone!

The W950i comes with no memory card slot, because you’re obviously not going to need it with 4GB of memory around to play with. Considering the M600i had a Memory Stick slot, one would wonder why it was removed in the W950i. To make more space for the 4GB drive? Perhaps. In any case, if you’re the type who’d run out of space on a 4GB phone, you’d probably be better off buying the iPod!

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Multimedia

The W950i Walkman phone plays back MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC, MP4 as well as WAV files. No sign of ATRAC3/ATRAC3plus support, something I’ve always found surprising. There is also an FM radio tuner in the phone which needs the wired handsfree connected to work as an antenna. It doesn’t work in Bluetooth A2DP mode!

The interface to browse through the music is typical Walkman: it sorts the tracks by artists, albums, songs, genres and a new mood setting. The mood can be set for each track, i.e. happy, sad etc., so if you’ve just broken up with your girlfriend or boyfriend, you can make the Walkman play all sad songs. The mood needs to be manually set for each track. You can even rate the music on a scale of one to five stars.

The phone supports regular playlists as well as automatic or dynamic playlists, so you can tell it to only play music that you’ve rated 5 stars and it’ll do so. It’s dynamic in that if you put a new track on the phone and rate it 5, it gets included in the playlist.

The phone has probably the best implementation of album art I’ve used yet in a handheld device: it takes any picture file in the folder with the music and shows it as the CD cover. No complicated AlbumArt_xxxx type file names and no software required to integrate the album art into the music files. Just put in any image in a folder and it’s the album art!

Sound quality of the W950i is obviously up there with the best of the best. Even the loud speaker on the phone sounds brilliant, as I had mentioned in my M600i review. The phone comes with HPM-70 in-ear phones that offer fantastic quality sound, very deep lows and cancel out most of the ambient noise, giving you an excellent music listening experience. In the event that the provided earphones don’t tickle your earbuds, you can always unplug them from the inline remote control which has a standard 3.5mm stereo socket into which you can plug in any headphones or earphones you want. For most people, however, the provided earphones will do just fine.

No Camera!

There is no camera in the W950i, just like the M600i, making it the first cameraless Walkman phone. Walkman phone consumers up till now have come to take the camera for granted, so the absence of a snapper in the W950i will come as a surprise to a lot. For a phone that costs this much, it’s extremely difficult to digest.

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Performance

The performance of the Symbian UIQ 3.0 OS is the same as the M600i: it is slow. There are fancy zoom and fade effects for the menus which only make it look slower. I have never liked UIQ and I never will. It takes 9 steps to change the damn ring tone!

Battery performance in the W950i was pretty good for a smartphone with this large a screen and such a large amount of disk space. On a full charge, I let the music play (haha… Shamur!) and it did so for around eight hours with a few calls and SMS in the middle. This doesn’t exactly surpass the 10-hour life on the box, but it comes pretty close and, of course, we did use the phone during the test. Pretty good.

Conclusion

This phone is astoundingly expensive at Rs. 29,000. Even if you manage to bag it off the street for a few grand less, it still retains the tag. The phone has a fabulous amount of storage - 4GB - and that too in efficient, reliable flash memory and offers amazing sound quality, but it has no camera, a very uncomfortable keypad and the UI is slow. Honestly, if I had Rs. 29,000, I’d buy a 30GB iPod (or a Zune, perhaps) and a Samsung D600 or something like that and be happy.