Sony-Ericsson W910i Walkman - High definition unboxing

Описание: Bearing the Walkman brand, this phone has to deliver when it comes to music. A Walkman button is found along its top edge to quickly access the tracks, though we find it too small for our liking. It's even harder to reach it with the slider up.

A motion sensor has been built into the W910i as well. This not only allows the user to control playback by shaking the handset, but also changes the orientation of the screen automatically in the media browser. If you ask us, the shake-to-change-tracks proposition is somewhat gimmicky and we don't see ourselves using it often after the initial novelty. We'd rather pipe music wirelessly to our HBH-DS980 Bluetooth stereo earphones and switch tracks on the accessory.

Although most of the recent Sony Ericsson models sport the new media-browsing interface, the W910i has a unique SensMe feature. It sorts music according to its tempo (fast and slow) and the mood (happy and sad) it evokes in an X/Y-axis graphical interface. So at a glance, one can see songs which are fast and happy, sad and slow, or happy and slow. We haven't come across any tracks which are fast and sad, so the top left quadrant is usually empty. Using the directional control, we could navigate the graph, which displays the title of the songs selected in a ticker tape on the screen.

With only 40MB of memory, music lovers will need an expansion card for their tunes. The format used in this handset is the Memory Stick Micro M2, Sony's flash media which is almost similar in size to the microSD format. They are usually priced at a slight premium compared to microSDs, though, so increasing the memory may require another chunk of change. What disappointed us was that Sony Ericsson didn't include a 3.5mm audio jack on the W910i, which would have been appropriate for a music phone.

Installed on our W910i test unit are three gaming titles. The Lumines Block Challenge, which is a modified version of the hit title Lumines on the Sony PSP, is a block puzzle game with a musical twist to it. However, the Marble Madness 3D game takes the cake for making use of the onboard motion sensor. The mission is to navigate the marble to the end of the maze by tilting the phone to control the orb. Although there's always the traditional keypad to fall back on, the fun is in playing the game using the motion sensor controls. Racing fans will also enjoy playing the V-Rally 3D game in landscape mode.

Connectivity-wise, the W910i is quite capable. The quadband handset supports HSDPA for high-speed downloads over the cellular network, a good feature to have if listening to or buying tunes over-the-air appeals to you. A front-facing camera above the phone's 2.4-inch LCD is for video calls.

Even though it's positioned as a music phone, the W910i's sub-par camera is admittedly disappointing. There's no autofocus (which accounted for a number of blurry pictures), no LED flash light for shooting in darker environments and no way to do self-protraits. Sometimes we wonder if it's a good idea to have such clear lines between a camera-phone and a music-phone. With Sony Ericsson, the Walkman series is usually fitted with a less-than-satisfactory camera module compared with its Cyber-shot brethren. Notably, users these days don't just look for a handset with a feature that takes priority over other functions. But that's just our take.

(CNET Asia)