Sony Ericson W910i

The Sony Ericsson W910i White has elegant and classy looks. The mobile handset is a 3G UMTS device with HSDPA(3.5G) support. The handset comes with a 2 mega pixels camera and offers a resolution of 320x240 pixels. The special attraction of the Sony Ericsson W910i White is its motion sensitive control “shake” to change the tracks and to play games. The Sony Ericsson W910i has common features like FM Radio, music player and offers expendable memory. The phone supports a feature called “ Sense-Me” that plays the songs according to one's mood. The dimensions of W910i are 100 x 50 x 13 mm. The phones weighs only 86 grams, making the W910i one of the lightest 3G phones available in the market today. In a nutshell, the Sony Ericsson W910i is a desirable phone for all.

The Sony Ericsson W910i is a slim, lightweight (just 86 g) Walkman slider with a good number of features. The W910i comes in 3 tasty colours - Hearty Red, Havana Bronze and Noble Black.

Design
A pretty mobile phone with some unique design elements. The 2.4-inch 240 x 320 (QVGA) resolution screen covers most of the front. Sony Ericsson have made some unique design choices for the W910i. The Walkman button has been placed on the top of the phone. The connector is on the W910i's left side.

The battery cover is locked - slide the piece of plastic beneath the battery cover to unlock. The battery cover is easy enough to remove. Build quality is good.

Keypad: The flat keys are OK. Press to click them down. They are a decent enough size, but could do with having a little vertical spacing between them. The keys have white backlighting.

Memory card slot: Remove the battery cover, slide in the memory card - a 1 GB Memory Stick Micro (M2) memory card. The W910i supports up to 4 GB. At 3 MB per song, you could fit 333 songs on the 1 GB memory card.

Features
2 MP camera
The camera is pretty average. Press and hold the camera button from the standby screen to activate the camera. Photos are taken in landscape orientation.
The W910i no flash, no auto-focus and no mirror on the back of the phone. 2.5x digital zoom (who cares about digital zoom?) and a set of options including: shoot mode, image size, shutter sounds, video size, self-timer, white balance, save options, macro mode, night mode and effects.
There's no camera lens cover - the lens is exposed to dirt, smudges and more. Screen material the lens is made of - plastic, glass, plastic layer over glass? Probably plastic - cheaper to manufacturer.

The camera can capture QVGA (240 x 320 pixels) video at 15 fps. Videos are saved in 3gp format. You can make 3G video calls with the front-facing camera 176 x 144 (QCIF) or 128 x 96 (SQCIF).

Music Player: The Sony Ericsson W910i features the Walkman 3.0 player. View songs by artist, albums, tracks, audio books, podcasts, playlists, SensMe, genre, year and video. There's also TrackID (music recognition service) and PlayNow (download music and ringtones).
SensMe: When you import music into the Media Manager, it will analyse the mood of the the track - fast, slow, sad, happy. Tracks are plotted on an x/y axis - select an area to play those tracks.
Fast Internet Downloads
Download from the Internet with fast 3G and HSDPA connection speeds. The NetFront Web browser is OK (we prefer Opera Mini and Safari mobile browsers) and the screen is a reasonable size - 2.4-inch.

Other Features

Media menu: Sony PSP style - organise photos, music, video and TV files.
Accelerometer: Auto rotate the screen when in 'Media' applications. Turn the phone sideways (to the left) and the screen orientation changes to landscape view. The auto-rotate features works, but there is a small delay.
The accelerometer (motion sensor) is also used for 'Shake Control'. When in music player mode, hold down the Walkman button (top of the phone on the right) and tilt the phone left/right to move go back/forward a track. Give the phone a shake and the music player will shuffle the tracks. Fun for about 60 seconds. It's easier to just press the navigation key.
FM radio with RDS: Attach the stereo earphones (the earphones sound fine).
Battery Life: Sony Ericsson claim 9 hours 2G network talk-time. 3.5 hours for 3G network talk-time. Turn off 3G and Bluetooth to get better battery life.
Text input: T9 predictive text. Not as fast as a good QWERTY keyboard.
Call quality: Fine. Could do with being a litter louder.
Games: Tennis Multiplay, Marble Madness 3D.
Speaker quality: The speaker is on the rear of the phone. It's OK. Could do with being a little louder. Better to use the supplied earphones or plug your own earphones/speakers into the W910i.
You'll need a 3.5 audio jack adapter. These cost just a few pounds. Google: Sony Ericsson 3.5 mm adapter.
Media Manager: Organise music, photos, video clips and podcasts on your PC, then transfer them to your phone. An improvement over Disc2phone software. If you lose your CD, download Media Manager from the Sony Ericsson Web site.
USB, USB mass storage: Like many other mobiles, the Sony Ericsson W910i acts as a mass storage device.

W910i vs W960i vs iPhone

W910i is excellent as a music player. The camera isn't great, but the W910i is lightweight and thin. There's 4 GB memory card support. Uses the new Walkman 3.0 software.
The W960i has the Walkman 3.0 interface and also has: 8 GB built-in memory, an Opera Web browser, 3.2 MP camera, and Wi-Fi (WLAN) support, a 2.6-inch touchscreen and Symbian OS. The W960i is also 3G. No HSDPA - how bizarre. The W960i is larger than the W910i - 1 cm taller, 5 mm wider and 3.5 mm thicker.
The Apple iPhone - big touchscreen screen, excellent music player, download music from iTunes, Cover Flow (flick through album covers), 8 GB of flash memory, simple and effective user interface.
The W910i is the cheapest mobile phone of the three. If you're not bothered about the camera or Wi-Fi and you want a slim lightweight device, the Sony Ericsson W910i is a very good choice.

Summary

Stylish, lightweight and good for music. Look at the CyberShot range of phones such as theK850i if you want a better camera phone. You can buy the W910i for free on contract (plus free gifts such as a Nintendo Wii or 16 GB iPod Touch), or for about £320 SIM-free.