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Performance

The W960i ships with a standard 950mAh Lithium-polymer cell that's rated for 9 hours of talktime and about 15 days on standby. In real-world conditions, the battery life performance was dismal. With our usual pattern of making calls, sending text messages and listening to music during commute, the cell gave up on us in less than 1.5 days. Be prepared to charge it every night if you don't want to worry about it dying mid-day.

Unlike the P1i, we didn't find the W960i particularly responsive. The slowdown was even more obvious when the 8GB memory started to reach its limit. There are two modes to choose from after we connect the W960i to the PC: Normal or Fast file transfer. For the latter, the W960i will show up as a flash drive, so copying of files to the handset is only a matter of dragging and dropping. Alternatively, Sony Ericsson also provides the media manager software to manage music files on the unit.

We found the onboard speakers pleasant and up to par. We didn't expect any lesser since that's a flagship model from the Walkman pedigree. Pairing to our stereo cans via Bluetooth A2DP happened without a hitch. We guess that's one way of avoiding the cables using the 3.5mm adapter.

The W960i takes average-quality pictures which most people would find okay. In terms of performance, there's a 0.6-second shutter lag, though that shouldn't matter that much as long as the hand is kept steady when pressing the shutter. The only gripe we have is that the camera interface didn't have one of those rectangular boxes that light up in green to show that the camera is focused and ready. Instead, the small icon on the bottom left does that. To sum it up, there's still work to be done on the UI of the camera.

Conclusion

So was the hype around the W960i justified? On paper, yes. Did it meet our expectations? No. The W960i may be one of the most elaborate music-phones we've seen, but is most unfortunately bogged down by several issues--poor location of Back button, lack of a built-in 3.5mm audio port, dismal battery life and laggy performance.

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