Sony Ericsson W660i Walkman

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Features
Let's get the basic specs out of the way. The W660i has a triband radio and it comes with 3G on the 2100MHz UMTS band. There's also Bluetooth with support for A2DP, FM radio with RDS, an external Memory Stick Micro card slot (you'll need this because there's only 16MB of onboard memory, barely enough for anything) and Sony Ericsson's proprietary port for cabled connection to the PC and earphones. A 512MB card is bundled with the commercial retail unit.

The W660i comes from the Walkman family so it has to meet those expectations on the music front. It supports a broad range of formats, including MP3 and AAC. There are two ways to listen to tunes on this Sony Ericsson: One is via the play/stop button on the left edge of the phone and the other is from the Walkman button on the front fascia. The first works like a shortcut so we could continue where we left off from our songs. The latter calls up the music player for additional playback options.

The W660i supports a broad range of formats, including MP3 and AAC

The interface on the music player is a bit utilitarian, but it works. The menus are arranged such that they require the user to scroll down to an option. For example, hitting Artists, then continuing with a right motion for a listing of all the artists in the folder. It's similar to a tree-like navigation system, but this is done mainly horizontally. Once we got the hang of it, finding our music was a breeze. There are also additional options to set the equalizer, visualizations, light effects and skins.

On the digital imaging front, the W660i comes with a main 2-megapixel camera and a secondary front-facing shooter for 3G video calls. It lacks the bells and whistles of its Cyber-shot counterparts, though. There's no built-in photolight or autofocus. The lens is protected by a tiny piece of clear plastic and our fingerprints regularly made nice lattice markings on the surface. So remember to clean it before you shoot. Digital zoom, if it was even useful in the first place, is not possible at the 1- and 2-megapixel resolution due to its interpolation nature. When you're done taking a picture, you can either save, upload to your blog or edit it via the onboard editing program.

Other applications preinstalled on the W660i are the Video/Photo/MusicDJs, video player, sound recorder, Web browser, RSS feed reader and organizer functions. The Bluetooth connectivity allows for wireless connection to a desktop, media player or controls for a slide presentation. There are also two onboard games: Extreme Air Snowboarding and Tower Bloxx.

We're a little bothered by a phonebook glitch we stumbled across, but hopefully it's an isolated problem with our review unit. When we tried to search for a contact (with SIM card as default) to send a typed SMS to, pressing an alphanumeric key didn't bring us to the corresponding letter in the list. So if we wanted to find CNET, usually we would press the number 2 three times to get to the letter C. On our unit, it bought us straight to the last contact on the phonebook. But once we copied our contacts on the SIM card to the phone's memory, this wasn't an issue anymore.

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