Sony Ericsson W910i

Mobile phone

By Ted Gibbons / Tuesday, July 29 2008

There's lot to like about the W910i, it’s very slim, it’s lightweight at just 86 grams, and it still feels well-built with a solid sliding mechanism. It’s a Walkman phone with a very nice audio player interface, it’s 3G HSDPA for fast browsing and it even supports a push email application. It’s also just $599, which is $300 less than it was initially announced at.

I can’t say I was enamoured of the Havana Bronze colour on the test unit (it was brown in my book) but you can also get it in black.

However, the W910i does also bug me in two significant ways. The first is the ridiculous proprietary connector on the side of the phone for the headset, charging and USB connection to a computer. This is the wrong place for a connector, and the connector itself is hopelessly bulky. When you’ve got a headset plugged in it’s like a having a huge black carbuncle on the side of the phone that completely cancels out the slim sophistication of the phone itself. What gives Sony Ericsson? Why not a standard 3.5mm jack for headphones?

Also, although memory expansion is provided by a handy memory card slot in the side of the phone, the memory card itself is a Memory Stick Micro, which is not going to work with anything else you own unless you’re a Sony devotee. And these cards are about three times the price of the more common SD card. Luckily, a 1GB card comes bundled with the phone.

Anyway, in the hand the W910i feels very nicely balanced and, as mentioned, its sliding mechanism feels solid and reliable. The keypad is almost flush but has nice big buttons that are easy to find and use. The five-way navigator on the front face is also excellent but the buttons each side seem needlessly parsimonious. There are acres of room there but the call and end buttons and the two soft buttons are jammed shoulder to shoulder as if they were cavalrymen at Custer’s Last Stand. This, of course, means you have to peck at them with your thumbnail instead of just pressing them.

One thing that made very happy about the W910i is its straightforward navigation. Previous Walkman phones I have encountered used a confused mixture of hard and soft buttons and even touchscreen controls to achieve simple tasks but with the W910i everything is intuitive and you always know where you are. A particularly good example of this is the very nice text messaging app that makes it fast and simple, with a minimum of button pushes, to use predictive text and get your message sent. And, despite the 910i not being touchscreen it still provides vibrating haptic feedback.

The W910i is also a very good phone with great network reception and voice quality, but its main claim to fame is as a music player. The new menu style here will be familiar to PS3 or PSP owners and it’s a pleasure to use. You can rewind, fast forward, equalise and shuffle tracks, and rate songs and create playlists. Of course, plenty of players will do all that so the W910i offers more tricks like TrackID that lets you record a few seconds of a song to send off for recognition of the name, artist and album. There’s also SensMe so you can create playlists based on tempo and mood. And, most gimmicky of all, there’s shake control so you can tilt the phone left and right to go to the next track or back to the last track, or shake the phone to shuffle your songs.

It should be noted here that the 910i does not work with Windows Media Player so you will have to use the supplied Media Manager software.

I was pleased to see that the Bluetooth A2DP standard is supported for wireless stereo headphones – that means no big carbuncle on the side of the phone. A pretty ordinary 2-megapixel camera rounds out the W910i’s abilities. I have to say, that despite a couple of missteps, I really liked this phone for its size, weight, interface and abilities.