Sony Ericsson W910 can be considered a big brother to the mid-end W580 Walkman phone. Both are pretty thin and have got the slider form factor. However where W910 really separates itself from the W580 is in terms of features, design and pleasure of usage. W910 is the first phone to have Walkman 3.0 with new music features and it’s also one of Sony Ericsson’s débutantes at using the A200 operating system.
Design
The Sony Ericsson W910 left side features nothing but the regular Fast Port.
A controversial pair of keys encloses the secondary camera and earpiece. The manufacturer calls them gaming keys but they seem to have more of an imaging application. The right key starts the thumbnails, while the left one is used for opening the selected images.
The right side of the handset makes up for the almost bare left. Here are the slightly elevated volume rocker, which can also be used for zooming when taking or browsing pictures, the M2 memory card slot, the flat shutter key and the lanyard eyelet.
The top part of the slider holds the On/Off key, which can also be used for fast switching between the ringing profiles. The Walkman key is much more interesting, but for the wrong reason. For the first time in the Walkman lineup the dedicated player key is controversially placed at the top. Among other things, it activates the Shake Control, but more on that later in the review.
The Sony Ericsson W910 bottom part features no keys or slots. Neat and simple, all you see is the Walkman logo. A suggestion that the microphone is placed somewhere on the inner side of the slide makes sense, as we didn't spot it elsewhere.
Rearside we find the 2-megapixel camera lens, Sony Ericson and Walkman logos and the loudspeaker grill at the foot of the battery cover. The locking mechanism of the battery cover is really intriguing. Below the cover there's a slider that either locks or unlocks it depending on its position. Once unlocked, a light push is enough to remove the cover. Under it is the 930 mAh Li-Poly (BST-39) battery. It's officially quoted at 400 hours of stand-by time and 9 h of talk time. In reality, 3 days of moderate usage is pretty much an adequate estimation, while adding extra diversions like listening to music or watching clips is sure to further reduce battery life. The SIM card holder is right above the battery bed. Removing the SIM card without the quick release mechanism is a feat.
Interface
I have always been a fan of Sony Ericsson’s user interface and menus. The user interface is really easy to get started with, normally quite fast to browse through and there are lots of nice effects and extras like Flash (Lite) menus and wallpapers.
The W910 is no different. The Flash implementation in W910 is by far the best I have ever seen on any Sony Ericsson phone. Not only are the three themes (five themes in total) with Flash menu and Flash wallpaper really nice to look at, they also move correspondently to the phone’s movements (thanks to the built-in accelerometer). This means that if you tip the W910 left when using the ‘Soundscape’ theme, the wallpaper and menu animations will go left. Tip it right and they’ll go right. When navigating back and forth with the Flash themes, the phone will also vibrate if this setting is turned on. Hardly useful for anything, but a fun detail. The menu is usually a 3 x 4 icon grid but some of the themes with Flash menus change this making it either horizontal or like a circle.
W910 is running the A200 software platform, which is the new version of Sony Ericsson’s most used operating system (used for feature phones only). The new software platform means that there’s no longer any dedicated back-button on the phone - instead you’ll have to use the right soft key now. The Choose-button is located at the centre soft key and the Settings-button is now at the left soft key instead of the right side in former versions. Another thing that has changed is the addition of dedicated call and end-buttons, so you’ll no longer have to use the soft keys to accept incoming calls or hang up. Furthermore the W910 has the regular Activity menu-button, which will bring up the Activity menu at any point in time, where you have direct access to running applications, games, new events, short cuts and Internet bookmarks. All in all the new software platform is working quite well, although it’s a bit more heavy on the processor of the phone resulting in a slightly worse performance than older phones running the A100 software platform. I am sure this will be fixed in a firmware update, though.
The phonebook can store up to 1000 entries with a total of 7000 phone numbers available (as opposed to K850 with its capacity of 5000 numbers). The phonebook interface makes good use of the three-soft-key layout, as seen in K850. In contacts you can directly open any contact with the middle soft key. The old More key is renamed Options and is now on the left side, while in old models, it was inevitably stuck in the right. The third soft key corresponds to "back". Another practical use of the middle soft key is the Send Message option, available when a contact is open and a number is highlighted. A good feature is the Smart Search, which lists all available contacts in the phonebook starting with the digits typed in the standby screen. The search engine looks up both letter combinations in names and phone numbers that start with the digits entered. Here in W910 it can also be switched off if not needed. Also present is the Send All Contacts option that transfers the entire phonebook to another compatible Sony Ericsson device. Now, apart from sending the phonebook via Bluetooth, it is supposedly possible to transfer "as text message", "as picture", and "as email" too.
As usual, you can choose whether the SIM contacts or the phone contacts should be default for the phonebook. Displaying both lists simultaneously is impossible. On a different note, a nice option allows you to auto save to SIM any new contacts that you're saving in the phone memory. Contacts can be ordered by First or Last name. They are searched by gradual typing of the desired name.
When adding a new contact, there are several phone number fields available: Mobile, Mobile (private), Mobile (work), Home, Work, Fax and Other. This is the first tab of fields for the new contact. The second one is for email and web addresses. The third is for assigning a picture, a custom ringtone and a voice command. The fourth goes for Title, Company, Street, City, State, ZIP, Country information. The last, fifth tab, is for additional information and birth date. When you add the birth date, the phone prompts adding it to the calendar and setting a reminder, which we found to be a handy feature. W910 has a 2 mega pixel fixed focus camera on the back. Fixed focus means that the focus of the camera can’t be set, making it impossible to get high quality close-ups and hard to get pretty landscape pictures without having a great loss of detail like leaves on a tree being really blurry and almost fading into each other. The camera is also lacking a flash.
The camera interface is the new and was introduced with the A200 software platform. It reminds you of the K850’s camera interface, but lots of features are missing and the design is different. The new interface has a nice feature when browsing through the settings - if you hover any setting it’ll automatically pop-up as a sub menu. This is much easier than having to press every icon before being able to set the settings.
The prior amount of short cuts mapped to a selected number of buttons on the keypad are missing. All you can do now is press ‘0′ to bring up a help window, where it is shown that the two gaming keys above the screen (A & B, as they are called) will act like Shoot mode-short cut and Night mode-short cut. Furthermore you are able to change the lighting settings (± 2.0 lux) and of course use the digital zoom - however this can’t be used in full 2 mega pixel resolution and will only give you a maximal zoom of 2.5 x in VGA resolution (0.3 mega pixel) only. It also seems like there is a zoom bug, because the phone gets extremely laggy when using the digital zoom. The up and down navigation keys can be used for switching between Camera, Video recorder and finally the photo gallery, where your last shot will be showcased. Here is a total overview of Settings on W910 camera:
Shoot mode - Normal, Panorama, Frames & Burst
Picture size - 2 MP (1600 x 1200 pixels), 1 MP (1280 x 960 pixels) & VGA (640 x 480 pixels)
Night mode - Off & On
Self-timer - Off & On
White balance - Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Fluorescent & Incandescent
Effects - Off, Black & white, Negative & Sepia
Settings - Picture quality (Fine & Normal), Review (On & Off), Save to (Mem. card & Phone mem.), Auto rotate (On & Off), Shutter sound (Sound 1, Sound 2, Sound 3, Sound 4 & Off) & Reset counter.
W910 camera
As you can see it is very clear that there’s a great loss of detail in the pictures. Areas with lots of details often get blurred out both detail and colour wise - sometimes it might even look like a water coloured painting or an effect that has been applied to the photo. In order to snap the best photos with W910 you’ll have to do it in great light conditions (preferably around noon on a bright summer day) and the subject has to be about 1 meter away from the camera (because of the fixed focus). W910 doesn’t manage dark environments that well not only because a flash is lacking, but also because the shutter speed is very slow making the pictures blurry. Although the phone tries to prevent this by turning up the ISO level (and thereby also the amount of noise), it fails terribly at doing so. Luckily W910 comes with PhotoFix which can do minor fixing regarding to light and colours, but this rarely works out the way you want and you’ll have to manually edit the photo in PhotoDJ afterwards to get the best result. None of this can be recommended though as it’s all digital processing and making a dark photo more bright will only cause more noise.
Videos can be recording in a maximum resolution of 320 x 240 pixels (QVGA) and with 15 frames per second. The quality is fairly good, but can’t be compared to other alternatives on the market that can record in both a higher resolution, better quality and a better frame rate. Just about all photo settings can be used in video mode, too.
The photo viewer is excellent and is found in the Media menu just like the audio and video player is. You can browse through different categories - latest photos, camera album, photo tags and at last pictures, where all pictures from the “Picture” folder in file manager is shown. If you choose to browse the camera album, the photos will be sorted by month. There are nice effects in the album, like when pressing a thumbnail picture, it’ll smoothly enlarge and end up filling up the display. You can tag the photos (i.e. if you’ve been to the zoo, then it’ll be easier to find only the photos from the zoo) and there’s also an option to play a slide show of the photos. X-Pict Story is the name of the slide show application and it enables lots of effects when the slide show is playing. You can listen to moody melodies and there are also quite a few effects on the photos, like panning and zooming.
Multimedia
W910 has the new Walkman 3.0 music player. The most noticeable changes compared to version 2.0 is the enhanced navigation, overview and addition of a few features such as SensMe and ShakeControl. SensMe is used for splitting up songs into different categories depending on mood and tempo. In my opinion it’s pretty useless and it requires that the media software, that comes with the W910, has analysed all the songs and transferred them to the phone through the same software. It doesn’t sound like being much of a problem, but this piece of software is extremely RAM hungry, imprecise, laggy and slow! It’s about five times faster to transfer to files without the software, but then songs can’t be used with SensMe.
ShakeControl is a rather nifty feature, which makes use of the built-in accelerometer in W910. Just hold down the Walkman-button on the top of the phone while the music is playing and start shaking the phone like a mad dog! For every shake, the phone will change song. Again, this is probably just meant as a show-off feature and it is easier to randomize the play list and then press the D-pad for the next song.
So lets start the music playing… The phone accepts most audio codecs - M4A, MP3, AAC, AAC+, E-AAC+, WAV, WMA, etc., so there shouldn’t be any problems on this front. If you’re not happy about the way the music is being played, you can always choose to set a equalizer setting or do a manual one. It also features MegaBass. You can hide the Walkman player if you want, so you can do other things while listening to music. A single press on the Walkman button at the top will minimize it and another press will open it again. The player is really nice looking and very easy to use. It’ll take you less than a minute to get familiar with everything.
So, what’s the audio quality like? Generally it’s very good, but when it’s at full volume it can get a bit distorted. You should try to keep it at 6 (6,5) / 8 in terms of volume level. At this volume level the audio is clear and good. The bass is nice, too. It is possible to change the visualization to either display to album cover or one of five different visualizations (waves, Walkman lines, inner twirl, circles, album lines) or no visualization at all. It is of course also possible to use a repeat and randomize feature when listening to music.A cool feature is that when entering the Walkman player the light in the soft keys and around turns orange instead of the normal green/red/white colours.
W910 has a built-in FM radio, too, which works when a headset is plugged in. It’s very good and because of the RDS you won’t loss the signal when driving around - it’ll automatically find the local frequency for the radio show, you were listening to. You can save up to 20 radio frequencies (can be done automatically). There are quite a few settings and the radio can be considered one of the best ever on a mobile phone. TrackID, as mentioned earlier, is a feature that can be used with the radio. It’ll sample a few seconds of the song on the radio, send the sample off to Gracenote and finally return with details about the song, artist, album, a link to purchase the song (operator dependent), etc. All in all, it works very nicely.
Conclusion
Sony Ericsson W910 is the top dog in the Walkman series when it comes to feature phones, the smarty W960 being a class of its own in the company's music portfolio. Some of W910 features are true high-end stuff: the quality display, elaborate music features, exquisite design, fast performance and 3G capabilities. Those however coexist with painfully familiar features and applications we've been getting in downright midrange handsets. Too much compromise to put up with in this price range and the tag on W910 is likely to get even the brand loyals a bit reserved. Nokia and Samsung seem to prepare a handful of cool music offerings in this price range too, while their non-music oriented handsets too have good music players. Despite the rich sales package, including a 1GB M2 card and the cool M2 USB reader, the W910 will be under pressure, as price is the ultimate decisive factor in this increasingly competitive market.
