Sony Ericsson W950i - 4gb of goodness

Sony Ericsson’s W950i is the current star of their walkman branded phone lineup; a Symbian 9.1 smartphone loosely based on the business orientated M600 with 4gb of onboard memory.

Sony Ericsson’s W950i is the current star of their walkman branded phone lineup; a Symbian 9.1 smartphone loosely based on the business orientated M600, the W950 looses the clumsy rocker paddle QWERTY keyboard, but gains walkman branding and a genereous 4gb of internal flash memory.  The trade-off here, though, is that external memory cards are not supported, and while 4gb should be enough for most peoples needs, sometimes the flexibility of being able to chop and change cards is useful to have (for backup and retores operations without the use of a pc, for example).

The form factor here is interesting – this is not a small phone(106х54х15); the (gorgeous) 2.6 inch 240*320 QVGA touch screen takes up a lot of space, and SEs decision to retain a numeric keypad rather than use the touchscreen entrirely means that the phone is quite large, and despite the black’n’orange trendy colour scheme, it resembles nothing so much as an 80’s Texas Instruments calculator. On the flip side, though, the phone is very thin and quite light (112 grams), meaning it fits into most pockets without issue (unlike the chunkier mini XDA windows mobile devices foe example), and crucially can still be used one handed, with a combination of the dedicated buttons and SE’s useful jog dial on the side. I suspect that the looks and size of the w950 are going to divide many people, but on the whole we rather like them – it’s thin enough to fit into a pocket, and large enough that you can grip it properly without needing hands like a porcelain dolls. It’s also worth sacrificing a little portability for a screen like this – it’s bright, doesn’t fade in the sun, and always appears sharp and vivid with good colour reproduction.

The keypad itself is a departure for SE, being a flush touch key model, which can be a little fiddly to use at first. The advantage is that keys do not tend to get inadvertently pressed whilst in pockets and the like, and after a bit of practice you can use the pad quite well by touch alone (there are raised dots to aid this), but overall we’d have preferred SE to stick with a regular pad. As well as the number keys are a dedicated button for the media player, a “C” key, and three music buttons which seem to essentially mirror the first row of number keys which have specific functions (play/skip/pause) when in music player mode. Whilst this may seem redundant they are brightly backlit in orange whilst the rest of the keypad is dark, which does make it easier to make at-a-glance presses.

Battery life is quite impressive - up to 340 hours of life time in stand-by mode and 7.5 hours of talk time.  In practice, normally usage saw us getting just over two days out of it, and 12 hours of solid music playback (under optimal conditions using “flight mode” you could expect more still)