Sony Ericsson W950i Walkman

By Damian Koh, CNET Asia
Jan 5, 2007

It's not the first candy-bar Walkman phone from Sony Ericsson, yet the W950i is nothing like typical bar-type handsets we have seen the company's series of music-phones. For a start, it looks and feels more like a smart phone, sharing an almost identical design as the M600i and offering both button and touchscreen inputs. Then there is the omission of an onboard camera which is a first for the Walkman lineup. The biggest surprise of all is that there is no memory card slot. In its place is a massive 4GB onboard storage memory, which will certainly appeal to music lovers.

Design
The whole talk about design is nearly always subjective. One man's meat may be another man's poison, but with Sony Ericsson's W950i, the deal is rather straightforward.

The candy bar is really a rectangular block with minimal protrusions. Compared with many handsets out there today, it may be a tad bulky but it does offer a comfortable ergonomic form factor for prolonged use with a stylus. Instead of the traditional hard buttons on most models, Sony Ericsson hides the keypad beneath the top cover of the handheld for a flushed surface treatment.

It's a mixed bag, though. We like how the unit masquerades as a portable media player rather than a mobile phone, but it is also difficult to type on the keypad because you cannot "feel" the buttons despite the tiny Braille-like protrusions on each key. The learning curve gets steeper if you're trying to text blind.

There's no mistaking the W950i for a music-enabled phone, not with the trademark "W" insignia on both the front and side. Unlike BlackBerrys which have their jog dials on the right of the handheld, favoring right-handers, the W950i has its jog dial on the left. A Back button below the dial allows easy access to the previously viewed page on the terminal. It is a tricky situation here since this reviewer is a right-hander and would have preferred the dial on the right. Suffice to say, after a few days of scrolling using the left thumb, we got used to it.

If the jog dial navigation isn't your cup of tea, there's always the large 240 x 320-pixel 2.6-inch touchscreen LCD that's capable of displaying up to 262K colors. In our tests, the panel didn't disappoint with its vibrant colors. Nor did the screen appear washed-out in bright outdoor light. Reading text was easy on the eyes. The stylus tips are colored orange on both ends, making it hard to miss even if you store this in its slot in the top left corner of the handheld.

A Play/Stop key and volume rocker lie on the right edge of the Walkman. Over in the rear, three orange dots below the Sony Ericsson logo line the onboard speakers.

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