Sony Ericsson W950i - Slender Symphony of a Phone

At the top of Sony’s Walkman range, the W950i is a media player and a 3G phone all rolled into one. Best of all, the integration of the phone’s function with the function of the media player is seamless, so you actually have a single functional device, rather than a phone that does a bad job of being a media player, or vice versa.

Like many of its PDA counterparts, the W950i is rather large and heavy, although still smaller than an iPod. Despite its width, the phone is relatively slim-line. The W950i is characterized by large touch screen, measuring 240 x 320 pixels. The touch screen is operated using the included (bright orange – you’ll never lose it!). The phone also supports hand-writing recognition, removing the constraints of the tiny keyboards offered by other PDAs. There is the traditional phone keypad beneath the touch screen. Some may find this keyboard slightly annoying, as it sits flush with the phone case and has no delineation between keys – if you have large hands, you may struggle to successfully key in numbers.

One important difference between this phone and its competitors is the absence of a camera. The designers at Sony figure that if you are searching for a good quality digital camera, you’ll buy a camera. Instead, Sony has concentrated on ensuring that the phone works as a fully functional media player. And it certainly does. Not only is there an impressive 4GB of available flash memory (equivalent to 4000 songs), but there is also some great included software. You can store music tracks from PlayNow, Sony’s download service, in either MP3 or AAC format. The AlbumArt feature also allows you to see how the CD version of your music would actually look. Using TrackID, singing or playing a few lines of music will return the title of the song, album and artist.

The phone has a built in FM radio and comes with a stereo headset, USB cable and software for ripping audio CDs to your phone. Since the phone is a dedicated media player, the included headphones are some of the best on the market and offer clear, crisp sound.

Business users are not neglected by the Sony Ericsson W950i. The phone is Symbian-based, which means you can download a stack of third-party applications for the phone. There is a viewer for common Office attachments and push email is also supported. This is a 3G phone, meaning that full web-browsing (using the Opera 8.0 browser) and fast downloads are possible. The large screen-size means that web pages display mostly as they were intended.

Unless you are really searching for a PDA phone with a camera, then the W950i is a great choice. With an impressive memory and excellent capacity as a music player, you can almost throw away your iPod!

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