Sony Ericsson is known for producing best quality audios from its W-Series Walkman phones and best quality camera phones with its C-Series Cybershot phones. The Sony Ericsson W995 boasts high quality music capability like other W-Series phones and also a good 8MP Camera which usually falls in the domain of Cybershot handsets. It is not a smartphone but still it packs in GPS, WiFi and 3G capability. With loads of multimedia features and smartphone like capability, can it make an impact on the mobile phone market? We have made a review to find answer. Let’s find out its positives and negatives.
Design
The phone follows a simple slider design. It measures 49mm wide and 97mm tall when closed and 125mm when opened. The phone is a bit thick at 15mm but anyway it is comfortable to hold in hand or put in pocket. The slide action at the top half of the phone seemed a bit loose, otherwise it was smooth. The numberpad is nicely designed. The keys are barely raised but they are spaced well apart which makes typing not so uncomfortable at top speed. However, the side buttons are very small and they aren’t raised that much to make a comfortable press by the fat fingered ones.
There is also that old connector port mounted awkwardly at side which can be used for both charging and listening to music. The good thing is that there is a through port on the mains power adapter so you can both charge and use headset at the same time. There is a kickstand for the phone to keep it in the landscape or the portrait mode but it is not so stable. The phone kept falling again and again with just little or no vibration.
Display / Interface
The 2.6 inches display is fantastic. Although there is not too much pixels in the QVGA screen at 240X320 pixels but the 256K TFT screen looks very bright and colorful. The interface is not too much crowded by thousands of featured like smartphones. The menus are basic icon/grid jobs and the icons look very nice, rich and colorful. Most of the features had a polished look that brought out the rich color depth of the screen.
Music
The music playing capabilities are simply superb in this phone. It outdoes many of the Walkman phones from Sony and perhaps all of the Nokia Music Edition Phones. The earbuds provided are of very good quality offering good full range sound quality. However, the stereo speakers looked very small and bass was absent from the sound, but it tried its best to produce good robust sound. Also, it is the first handset from Sony Ericsson that has the most sought after 3.5mm headset jack so that you can connect your favorite earphones to this device.
The music player on the phone is also very good. Finding music is easy on its interface. You can create playlist or open the built-in EQ or Stereo Widening Settings for enhancing the music. There is also shake control for changing volume or go forward or back between tracks. You have to shake the phone towards or away from you to change the volume and shake it to the left or right to forward or back between tracks.
The internal memory of the device is 118MB but an 8GB Memory Stick Micro is provided to store all your favorite music and videos.
Camera
The 8.1 Mega Pixels autofocus Camera belongs to the Cybershot series. There are a plenty of features like smile detection, face detection and Best Pic and geo-tagging but we would’ve preferred an Xenon flash over its single LED Flash. The image quality is very good and also the color reproduction is fairly accurate like a top class camera. The macro mode is also able to capture nice details of a close objects.
Connectivity
The phone supports quad band GSM 850/900/1800/1900 frequency bands. The supported 3G bands are HSDPA 900/2100 and HSDPA 850/1900 for the american version W995a. The 3G speed support is upto 7.2 MBps. It also supports WiFi Connectivity. The call quality is good and the reception always showed full bars in the city areas. It also supports GPRS, EDGE, and Bluetooth Connectivity with A2DP for Stereo headset.
Battery Life
It comes with a standard Lithium Polymer Battery of 930 mAh capacity but we expected it to be at least 1500 mAh for an entertainment device like this. Though the battery life is claimed to last for nine hours of calling and 15 days standby time, it barely manages to produce one third of the claimed number. Continuous movie watching on this device lasted for about four hours to make the battery from full to nil.
Pros
- Great Music Features
- Easy to use interface
- Robust GPS Features
- 3.5 mm audio jack is welcome
- Multitasking Support
Cons
- Web Browsing features not up to the mark
- Battery Life is disappointing for an entertainment device
- No DivX/Xvid support though it is touted as a video-centric phone
- Video Recording resolution limited to WQVGA
- No office document viewer
Conclusion
The device is not a revolution by any means – there is nothing new in it. But there is almost every feature that one can expect from a mobile phone – I mean to say don’t expect it to wash your clothes or make tea for you! If you are looking for a feature rich handset which is also relatively easy to use and has the best quality music and camera, this is the perfect one for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment