The Sony Ericsson W950i is an innovative piece of mobile phone engineering in a number of ways and in most of these, it actually excels.
The W950i is both a 3G and smartphone. Even though it is 3G, it has actually dispensed with a camera. Our view is that this is NOT a significant omission as we firmly believe cameras on mobile phones are largely a gimmick. Dedicated digital cameras are now the same size and sometimes smaller than phones and they perform way better in that regard. It is also true that a customer in need of a business tool like a PDA or smartphone will not miss this gimmick.
Back to the W950i. The phone comes with a massive 4 Gb native storage space and if you were to use this for music only, you can store up to a thousand full-quality MP3 tracks. A wide range of file formats is supported including MP3 and AAC. Ripping music using the supplied software (Disc2Phone) is straight-forward.
The W950i’s performance as a music player is awesome. The supplied headset is top-quality and if you want to listen to your music wirelessly, you can get the optional Bluetooth® headset which is supported. The phone also comes with an inbuilt FM radio.
The large and crisp display (262K TFT) is touchscreen and a stylus is supplied. This makes web-browsing a doodle via the bundled Opera 8.0 browser. There is also a viewer for Office applications and synchronising with a PC works without a hitch.
Being 3G means, internet access is fast and you can download music or data from the internet at speeds up to 384 Kbps in areas of good coverage.
The screen also supports handwriting recognition. This could in some cases, allow you to avoid the keypad which, in this phone, may be important as we shall see shortly.
This phone comes with all the usual fare of features we have come to expect from a high-end smartphone.
Does it have a weakness? There may be a debate on this but our view is that the flat keypad is not very user-friendly, something partially offset by the touchscreen and stylus. The keypad is not that easy to use. The phone also feels rather wide at 54 mm (2.1 in). This is probably being picky as the phone is quite slim for a 3G smartphone. It is certainly more ergonomic than, for instance, the P990i which is 10 mm thicker and almost 40g heavier. Overall, our conclusion is that the Sony Ericsson W950i is a masterpiece.
Size: 106 x 54 x 15 mm
Weight: 112g (4oz)
Talk time: (Up to) 7.5 hrs (2G), 2.5 hrs (3G)
Standby: (Up to) 340 hrs
