Sony Ericsson W950i review

The phone uses the Walkman player 2.0 that lets you organise your music into artists, albums, tracks, playlists and moods. The moods option lets you put your tracks into happy, sad, energetic, chilled or no mood categories, so you can select music that suits your disposition with the click of a button.

You can browse through albums by looking at album art thumbnails. There's the option to play tracks in shuffle and repeat mode and you can also play the top rated, most played, least played and last played.

One of the more practical features is the ability to set the player to sleep after a predetermined time so that you don't have to worry about forgetting to turn it off -- great if you commute and forget to switch it off when you get to the office.

If you get bored of listening to your own music, you can always use the impressive, built-in FM radio. This uses a cool service called TrackID. This records a few seconds of a song and then sends the clip to the Gracenote worldwide music database, which then identifies the track and relays the information back to the phone in less than a minute.

TrackID also works with the built-in microphone to record music that you hear in a car or pub, somewhat like Shazam's music recognition service. You can then buy and download the track that you've overheard over the air. You can also receive and transfer music over an infrared or Bluetooth connection.

To listen to music, you need to use the 3.5mm adaptor that comes in the box together with either the provided pair of headphones or your own. We'd prefer it to have a standard 3.5mm port, but at least the adaptor has an in-line remote so you can control your music without needing to touch the phone, plus a microphone so you can take calls. When a call is received, the player automatically pauses the track you're listening to and resumes playing when the call is finished.

The W950i also supports A2DP (stereo Bluetooth) so you can also listen to music wirelessly using a pair of stereo Bluetooth headphones.

You might think that the features stop there, but this is also a smart phone that runs on a UIQ interface and therefore supports a plethora of third-party software. It supports POP3, IMAP4 and push email, lets you make conference calls and has a Web browser.

Importantly, it will soon be available with 3's new X-Series flat-rate data plan, which gives you unlimited Web browsing and free Skype-to-Skype calls to any PC or other X-Series user worldwide, as well as the ability to search on Google and Yahoo, send MSN instant messages to your friends, watch your TV from a Slingbox, access your computer at home with Orb and buy or sell stuff on eBay.

Other features include a flight mode, MMS and SMS messaging, Java games, polyphonic ringtones, a calendar, an alarm clock, notes, tasks, a voice recorder, voice dialling, over-the-air synchronisation (SyncML), a video player, a timer, a stop watch, a calculator and a file manager.

Performance
Calls sound clear, crisp and loud and the speakerphone works as expected. The audio on the music player is excellent and music didn't sound distorted or tinny. We listened to Bedouin Soundclash's When The Night Feels My Song in MP3 format and didn't notice any distortion in the high-end or low-end.

The provided in-ear headphones are better than the majority of bundled ones, but we found the player sounded best when using our own headphones. It's a shame, however, that the W950i doesn't have a built-in 3.5mm socket. Listening to music on the loud speaker is only good for annoying commuters on a train and will not replace a decent pair of phone speakers, like the Sony Ericsson MDS-70 home audio system.

The stereo Bluetooth works well and we found it easy to pair with set of Sony Ericsson stereo Bluetooth HBH-DS970 headphones. The lack of a camera didn't particularly bother us, but it was annoying when we wanted to take a quick picture of something and didn't have a digital camera to hand. While this may frustrate you, it's not a deal breaker.

Battery life is quoted at 340 hours on standby and 450 minutes of talk time using GSM and 250 hours on standby and 150 minutes of talk time using 3G. Our review model lasted for about two days before we had to recharge it.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Kate Macefield