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.

Features
The most asked questions among mobile users are whether a phone has a camera, Wi-Fi, 3G, how much memory it offers, etc. Well, the answer is yes and no for the W950i. Connectivity options on this Sony Ericsson include 3G, Bluetooth (with A2DP support), infrared and a proprietary port to connect a charger, portable handsfree, USB cable and other accessories. If we had our way, we would have preferred wireless LAN as a feature on the W950i as well. Look elsewhere, too, if you want a built-in digicam for the occasional snaps.

Sony Ericsson's main pitch for the W950i is its onboard 4GB memory, which roughly stores 1,000 songs (of 4MB each). This, together with an additional 60MB for user data, rivals many of the portable music players in the market today in terms of storage capacity. That's all sweet on paper until you realize there's no memory expansion slot for easy sharing of files and documents with devices. There's Bluetooth and infrared, but they still can't beat the convenience of removing a memory card and slotting it into another host device to transfer data.

The W950i is a bundle of joy when it comes to music entertainment. Massive storage capacity aside, this Sony Ericsson also has FM radio with radio data support (the handsfree headset is required to act as an antenna). If you hear an unfamiliar song over the air, record a few seconds of it and TrackID will reply via a text message to your phone. The bundled handsfree kit allows you to skip or go back to the previous track and adjust volume, but unfortunately there's no Hold button on the wired remote to prevent users from accidentally hitting the keys during use.

Like most music players, there are options to build your own song playlists, rewind and fast forward and shuffle tracks, and an audio equalizer for various tempo and beats. Add a star (up to five) for your favorite songs and assign different color moods to go with each of them. Supported audio formats generously include 3GPP, AAC+, MIDI, MP3, MP4, WAV, WMA and Real Audio. As with other Sony Ericsson Walkman phones, switching between the music player and phone is seamless. The music stops when there's an incoming call and continues where it left off after you hang up. Flight mode turns off your cellular network, but you can still fiddle with your tunes and other features on the unit.

If you want to get more creative, you can also compose your own melodies with MusicDJ to use as ringtones. Alternatively, there's an onboard player for video playback or you can sing into the recorder for listening later.

Sony Ericsson bundles the Disc2Phone software to drag-and-drop songs from your music CDs to the phone, as well as the PC Suite synchronization software with the W950i. The handset runs on Symbian OS version 9.1 and we could get our PC and Microsoft Outlook to sync with the phone quite effortlessly. The uncluttered user interface on this candy bar is easy on the eyes with options to display the user menu either as icons or a dropdown list. On the Home screen, a row of five default icons brings you to the Walkman, FM Radio, Web, Messaging and main menu. More onscreen shortcuts can be found on the top corners of the LCD panel, one of which sends you to the Task Manager. You'll find this useful if you want to close applications running in the background in order to speed up operations on the handheld.

Entertainment goodies aside, the W950i also comes with an Opera Web browser, an RSS feed reader, SMS, MMS, Push email, handwriting recognition, flight mode, conference call capability and 3D games.

Performance
We tested the 3G-enabled Sony Ericsson W950i and found the call quality and reception good with the built-in speakers sufficiently loud. Even though the speakers are on the rear, at maximum volume, music was clearly audible when the handset was placed on its back on the table. We found out, though, that the volume only picked up considerably toward the end of the volume bar indicator on the screen, meaning there was hardly any audible difference to the volume for the first half of the volume tracker.

The PC Suite software did its job competently. It was relatively intuitive and easy to use, though we did encounter minor synchronization issues, but those were eventually resolved without a hitch.

You can choose between two types of transfer options when you connect the W950i to a PC: The Normal mode and the Fast file transfer option. The latter is solely for copying of music, images and other files to the phone memory at a higher speed. As a gauge, 400MB of data took 14.5 minutes using this connection.

If you commute daily for about 1.5 hours and listen to either your MP3s or radio faithfully, then you can expect the 950mAh Lithium-polymer battery to take you through three days on normal usage comprising some calls and text messages. While on GSM networks, the company rates the phone for 7.5 hours of talktime and 340 hours on standby. As a music player, we managed to keep the Walkman playing for 8 hours with 50 percent of the battery life still intact.

The Sony Ericsson W950i has a SAR rating of 1.35 watts per kilogram.