Sony Ericsson W960i

The Sony Ericsson W960i is a “Walkman” version of the Sony Ericsson P1i 3G smartphone, and it can be considered to be a straight upgrade to the existing W950i.Two major improvements with the W960i over the previous model are the inclusion of a 3.2 megapixel camera and WiFi support - the lack of a camera on the older model was an oddity due to the fact that it too was based on another Sony Ericsson smartphone, this time the M600i. One thing to notice about the W960i is the unusually uncluttered design - this is because the W960i uses a large 2.6″ 240×320 pixel resolution touchscreen plus a jog dial. The W960i’s underlying operating system is Symbian with the UIQ interface on top, which means that there are a wide variety of applications available, possibly also including corporate push email solutions. This makes the W960i an unusually powerful member of the Walkman family.There are a couple of major differences between the W960i and the P1i - the most obvious one is that this has a conventional numeric keypad rather than the expanded version on the P1i. Another major change is that the W960i comes with a whopping 8GB of memory, but this isn’t expandable - the W960i doesn’t support any type of memory card expansion.

Although 8GB is plenty, many people like to be able to transfer data (especially pictures) to another machine using a memory card rather than a cable, so some people might find that annoying.The 3.2 megapixel camera comes with autofocus and appears to have a built-in flash and there’s a secondary camera for video calling.Of course, this is a Walkman phone and these latest additions to the Sony Ericsson range come with an enhanced multimedia management suite including access to the PlayNow download service. The music capabilities of Sony Ericsson’s Walkman phones have always been well regarded, and the W960i promises to be even more impressive. Multimedia support includes MP3, AAC and eAAC+ audio plus a variety of video formats.

Other features include stereo Bluetooth, a built-in FM radio, web browser, email client and RSS reader. On top of that there are document viewers and editors, personal information management functions, email synchronisation, handwriting recognition and a whole host of other goodies that mean that the W960i should be equally useful for business users- (we can see that this will be a rival to the popular BlackBerry Pearl in this respect.It is an unusually elegant looking device, available in one colour only (Vinyl Black). Despite the wide range of features, the W960i weighs a reasonable 119 grams and measures 109 x 55 x 16mm. Sony Ericsson anticipate that the W960i should be available in Q2 2007.