Sony Ericsson W760i review

Performance
We've enjoyed using this phone so much. Its menus are slick and attractive and the physical controls are well placed. It's not flawless, but we're confident most people will agree it's a nice handset to use.

Music can be dragged and dropped through Windows or synced with either Windows Media Player or Sony Ericsson's bundled software. We had trouble getting video on here, though, and we wouldn't recommend the W760i if watching video is a major desire. File transfers are also extremely slow -- around eight to ten seconds per 320Kbps MP3.

Testing with uncompressed, lossless WAV files, we heard a decent sound quality, though through our reference-grade headphones we could hear a tiny element of background distortion. Most people won't even notice this and it won't be an issue for casual listening. A keen ear with a good pair of earphones may spot it.

Call quality is great and you should get a brilliant 9 hours of calls or 400 hours of standby time. Pictures quality is okay too, though at full resolution there's a good deal of noise. Check out our full-res example shot here.

If there was one more thing we'd like, it'd be Wi-Fi. No, a music phone doesn't necessarily need it, but considering the inclusion of so many other features that aren't synonymous with music phones, Wi-Fi is notably absent from the W760i.

Conclusion
The W760i is probably our favourite Sony Ericsson Walkman phone to date and with its terrific design encasing a feature-packed and high-performing handset, it rivals even Nokia's N95. Even if you're not bothered about Walkman features, you'd be daft not to consider it for its other selling points.

Its biggest let down is its lack of a standard headphone socket. In this area, it's no competitor to dedicated MP3 players or the terrific 3.5mm-ready Motorola Rokr e8.

Edited by Shannon Doubleday