Sony Ericsson W902 Walkman review

Sound quality is decent, providing you upgrade the budget earphones that come in the box. A dedicated MP3 player such as a Creative Zen, Cowon D2 or iPod classic sound noticeably better, and dedicated players offer way more music and video features. But for casual listening, it's a great music phone that most people should enjoy using.

The phone supports H.264 MPEG-4 video, as well as lower quality WMV, and we enjoyed a full episode of a popular TV programme on the handset. We encoded the 100MB file ourselves in H.264 with a 320x240-pixel resolution, and a combined bit rate of around 512Kbps. No software comes bundled for doing this, and using Windows Media Player only converts to less impressive WMV quality. But if you know what you're doing the phone can, in practise, support half-decent video.

Still, we can't help but notice that there's really nothing different between the W902 and every other Walkman phone from the last 12 months. It strikes us as a typical Sony Ericsson, just with a better camera and a new case -- evolution, not revolution, and only mild evolution at that. So is it worth the wait?

Conclusion
In a word, yes. The W902 offers the best camera we've seen on a dedicated music phone, with a decent interface for browsing media and a solid, attractive design. It suffers hard at the hand of whoever at Sony Ericsson hates 3.5mm headphone sockets, but if you want a full-featured music phone with a great camera, fast Internet and above average sound quality, it's one to check out.

If you can live with a 3-megapixel camera but want integrated satellite navigation, check out the Sony Ericsson W760i. Subjectively, we'd still choose this over the W902, because we prefer the design and quite frankly it's the same phone on the inside.

Edited by Marian Smith