Sony Ericsson W995 Walkman review

The Walkman button has moved from the top to the side as well, but this is a good change -- it's much easier to press than on previous phones. You can hold it down and shake the phone to shuffle tracks, snap it left and right to skip tracks, and tilt it up and down to control the volume. It's a fun feature, if you can be bothered to use it, and it's responsive to small movements, so you won't look like an overexcited phone juggler.

Media Go is media great
The W995 sports another first for a Walkman phone: the new Media Go software, which helps you transfer music, videos and photos to and from the phone via USB or Bluetooth. With an iTunes-like look, Media Go is a massive improvement over Sony Ericsson's old music-transfer software. It's also easier to use than Apple's software because it doesn't include an online store.  

As well as music, we had no trouble transferring AVI, MP4 and WMV movie files onto the phone, and they looked smooth and clear during playback. The phone's built-in accelerometer makes it easy to switch from portrait to landscape mode, and there's a cute little flip-out stand on the back, so the W995 can be propped up when you want to watch videos.

For those who can't be bothered to take on another music manager, we found that the W995 also worked well with our standard media manager, MediaMonkey. But look out if you're a Mac user: Media Go is only for PCs.

Sluggish sharpshooter
The W995 doesn't skimp on the camera, with an amazing 8.1 megapixels packed in and an LED photo light. Its photos are slightly noisy, but very sharp when you hold the phone steady. When moving, the camera struggles and snaps are very blurry. There's also about a 2-second shutter lag between pressing the camera button and snapping a photo, and writing to the memory card takes another couple of seconds, so you won't be taking many quick-reaction shots.

As long as you keep your hand steady, the 8.1-megapixel camera will take sharp photos

There's also an image-editing feature called PhotoDJ that lets you adjust your photo settings, such as brightness and contrast. It's straightforward, but rather slow.

YouTube isn't your tube
The W995 has great connectivity, with Wi-Fi and 3G, so downloading more media isn't a problem, and there's plenty of room on the 8GB memory card. We were disappointed with the built-in YouTube and RSS feed support, however. Although the YouTube application is easy to use, videos look heavily compressed and jerky over 3G, and we struggled to get the W995 to stream over our Wi-Fi connection. Subscribing to RSS feeds and podcasts is easy in the Web browser, but managing the feeds afterwards can prove tricky.

We also had problems with the built-in iPlayer app, which looked great until it started buffering, and then denied us our live and pre-recorded Wimbledon streams.

Conclusion
With the Sony Ericsson W995 Walkman, we've finally found a phone that could replace our MP3 player. Great music quality, a standard headphone jack and straightforward music-transfer capability mean this phone has everything we need to keep rocking. A couple of the built-in apps aren't impressive, but that's a minor niggle on a phone that's easy to use, well-designed and looks great. The 8.1-megapixel camera is the icing on the cake and handy extras like the built-in stand and loud stereo speakers are the little candy sprinkles.

Edited by Charles Kloet