The Sony Ericsson W950i is a very slim & highly attractive 3G Walkman® mobile phone which comes in an eye catching mystic purple coloured casing. The W950i is extremely thin considering all that is inside the 106 x 54 x 15 mm casing. The phone weighs a total of 112 grams which makes the W950i feel solid & provides a high quality feel to the handset. The phone package comes with a complete Walkman® music kit which includes a stereo headset, music management software & a USB cable.
The Sony Ericsson W950i may shoulder a few disappointments but you can’t fault its music player. Like the W850i, it uses the latest Walkman 2.0 player version and its 4GB flash-memory can store around 1,000 tunes if encoded at 128kbps in AAC format. Of course you can cram more tunes in if you use eAAC+ but sound quality may deteriorate. Sony Ericsson has chosen flash memory over a hard-drive because its lack of moving parts proves to be more robust and minimises internal damage should the W950i take a few knocks.
The Sony Ericsson W950i sheds the full QWERTY keypad of the M600i and gives you a normal numeric keypad. The side columns of keys have been removed and now you only have a Walkman (or ‘media’ key) and a C key instead. The keypad is flat and sort of retro ‘touch-sensitive’, comparable to the RAZR or the recent Samsung Ultra Edition 9.9, but unfortunately it is not as good as the former. It is not comfortable to type on, because the keys are a bit small and the lack of any border demarcations can make you accidentally press the wrong keys.
The sony ericsson W950i makes a better music phone than a video phone. Though you can drag over short videos in iPod-compatible MP4 format (which takes up to 10 minutes or so), for longer videos you must use the mobile-phone–friendly 3GP format. Most 3GP converters default to creating low-quality videos for low-end phones. Too bad it’s so hard to encode video for this phone, because landscape-format videos look great on the W950i’s big screen.
It’s compact and lightweight and feels just right in the hand. The W950i has a flat keypad, that is actually very easy to use, together with a jog dial and dedicated music player keys on the sides of the keypad for easy access to your music collection. In addition the Sony Ericsson W950i has a touchscreen and stylus that makes navigation a breeze. It also supports handwriting recognition.
The Sony Ericsson W950 is an exciting new addition to the Walkman series of Sony Ericsson. It is a smartphone based on the Symbian 9.1 UIQ 3.0 with a stylish and yet classical design. Although it doesn’t feature a camera, the 4GB of free space and the dedicated multimedia keys would make any music lover jump from joy. The large touchscreen TFT display with QVGA resolution is just another fascinating feature for the tech buffs.
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