Sony Ericsson W910i review

If you have ever wanted to rock to the music, now you can. Sony Ericsson's W910i Walkman phone allows you to, quite literally, do so thanks to a motion sensor 'Shake control'. This interesting addition allows you to switch from track to track at the flick of a wrist. As well as its original features, the W910i also has an impressive music mobile lineup that backs up its unique qualities.

The Sony Ericsson W910i is a wide and slim sliderphone, featuring the latest Walkman Player software (3.0) and 3G HSDPA mobile broadband technology. This means speedy downloads of up to 3.6Mbps can be enjoyed, which also means internet browsing is equally pacey.

The W910i packs a camera as you would expect in this day and age but it is a limited 2.0-megapixel shooter, without the autofocus or flash from one of Sony Ericsson's Cyber-shot handsets. A second lower resolution camera allows for video calls.

The W910i is an attractive handset in both look and feel. It comes in several colour options - Noble Black, Hearty Red or Havana Gold - and has a rubberised tactile touch plus a smooth action slider mechanism.

It's a pocket-friendly 12mm thin and weighs a modest 83g, though its rectangular shaped body isn't the smallest sliderphone around, measuring 99(h) x 50(w) mm. This accommodates the ample 2.4-inch dsiplay (a 240x320 pixels 262,144-colour TFT LCD screen).

The display is large enough to demonstrate the benefits of some more of Sony Ericsson's motion sensor trickery - automatic screen orientation in media mode. Move the phone from portrait to landscape, or vice versa, and the screen automatically switches to the appropriate way up. A neat trick that saves on button pressing - and looks good too.

The screen takes up most of the front panel. Beneath it, a circular navigation D-pad - which is also marked up with Walkman player buttons - is at the centre of the W910i's controls. This is flanked by a familiar arrangement of softkeys, call/end buttons, a regular clear key and a button for the Activity Menu - an option that pulls up some useful shortcuts and features into one sub-menu. Softkeys The navigation control pad can also be user-configured for four of your own preferred fast key access from the standby display. Alternatively, you can get into the full icon-based menu system by the route one method - pressing the central menu key. The W910i's slider numberpad is straightforward - smooth and almost flush, but the large keys are raised just enough to make it good for texting.

Just above the display, two discreetly small, anonymous gaming buttons are designed for adding oomph to the gaming experience, with Sony Ericsson's W910i providing some good looking sophisticated 3D games as part of the package. In standby mode, these keys deliver another quick way into the phone's camera albums.

The W910i's camera can be switched on by a quick access key on the side too; this acts as the shutter control when snapping in landscape format, while the volume rocker keys operate the camera's 2.5x digital zoom - albeit, only when the lowest resolution VGA camera option or the video capture mode is used.

The W910i doesn't come with multi-gigabyte onboard memory; instead, you get 35MB of internal storage plus memory card expansion using Memory Stick Micro cards. A 1GB card is supplied in the box, although you can use cards of up to 4GB. These slide easily into a slot on the side of the phone.

As with any Walkman phone, the music player is the chart-topping feature. Unusually for a Walkman mobile, the quick key to fire this up is tucked out of the way, on top of the phone. It's a tiny button, with a barely visible Walkman logo on it. Its low-key presence is partly explained by its role in the Shake control option we mentioned at the beginning. Once the music player is engaged, you can flick through tracks by holding down the Walkman button while tilting the phone to the left (forwards) or right (backwards), or shaking it to activate shuffle mode.

This is a little more awkward to do than it sounds, owing to the fiddly size and position of the Walkman button - we reckon it would have been better placed on the side of the phone. A bit of vibrating feedback lets you know that the phone's registered your track flicking, but in practice the Shake control doesn't really offer any operational benefits; you'll probably make more use of the standard, easy to use navigation forward/back buttons. We expect the Shake control will see most action showing off to friends... It's always good to see a mobile maker innovating however, so hopefully Shake control Mark II might be more of a must-use function than a gimmick.

As for the music player, it's what's in the grooves that counts and the Walkman player puts in an excellent music player performance. It has a very intuitive user interface, supports album cover art, and offers a range of options; tunes are organised by artist, albums, tracks, genres, and year. Playlists can be created, and there are also separate options for Audio books and Podcasts. Another bit of Sony Ericsson innovation is an alternative method of creating playlist - the SensMe option.

SensMe is a way of creating playlists from tracks by mood. Using Sony Ericsson's Media Manager PC software supplied, you can sync tracks to the phone with various SensMe mood rankings. These are plotted against two axes - Fast/Slow on the vertical and Sad/Happy on the horizontal. Individual tracks are placed according to their ratings, so you can select tracks by mood - for example, a slow sad song, a not so slow but happy-ish track, or a full-on 180bpm grin-maker.

While it offers a bit of novelty, in reality its usefulness will be limited for most people - though it could find its niche in soundtracking high-tempo exercise sessions.

The Walkman player produces excellent sound quality, delivering a good tonal range including plenty of bass whack through the supplied earphones. The earphones are better quality than most regulation 'phones boxed with standalone MP3 players, although you can also choose to add your own earphones via a 3.5mm jack socket on the Sony Ericsson handsfree headset's in-line microphone.

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