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First announced in May of 2006, the W710i is Sony Ericsson's folder style Walkman music phone for the active set. In addition to the typical features found in a Sony Ericsson Walkman phone, it also sports things like an FM radio and a built-in pedometer to keep runners and walkers both entertained and informed.

The folks at mobileburn made a review of this phone and here are some of their impressions. The Sony Ericsson W710i comes equipped with a fixed focus 2 megapixel camera. While the camera has fairly nice features, such as accurate white balance, frames, and a panorama mode, the overall quality of the photos is not quite as good as we have come to expect from Sony Ericsson. The issue seems to be the lens, which takes photos that are not consistently focused. The photos are fine for emailing to friends, just not for making prints. The camera can record videos as well, but they appear to have a fairly low frame rate. The video app supports most of the same features as the camera and also has a microphone muting option.

Like with any Sony Ericsson Walkman branded phone, you can expect a very good music listening experience from the W710i. The large orange colored external display and the surrounding dedicated music controls make playback when the phone is closed very convenient. The main application, accessible when the phone is open, organizes your music just as any good MP3 player would: by playlist, track, and artist. There are a few equalizer settings available to adjust the sound quality, if you like. I was pleased with the quality of the sound overall when the W710i was used with both wired and Bluetooth wireless stereo headphones.

The phone itself has only about 16MB of free built-in memory for photos and songs, but the W710i does have an M2 (Memory Stick Micro) card slot for additional storage space. Our W710i came with a 512MB card included. While it is not necessary to remove the battery to swap memory cards, you do have to remove the rear cover of the device. This shouldn't be a real issue unless you plan on constantly swapping out cards.

The conclusion is that, while I don't consider it to be one of the better looking handsets the company has created, the Sony Ericsson W710i is still a very capable and fun handset to use. It might not have a best in class camera, but the music playback (with stereo Bluetooth support) and the built-in pedometer make it a great companion for commuters and athletically inclined people alike.

If not for some issues with audio quality on calls, I might have been convinced to give the W710i a higher rating, but as is, I instead give it an enthusiastic "Recommended" rating.

Read full review on mobileburn.

The Sony Ericsson W950 is an exciting new addition to the Walkman series of Sony Ericsson. It is a smartphone based on the Symbian 9.1 UIQ 3.0 with a stylish and yet classical design. Although it doesn’t feature a camera, the 4GB of free space and the dedicated multimedia keys would make any music lover jump from joy. The large touchscreen TFT display with QVGA resolution is just another fascinating feature for the tech buffs. It seems that the W950 has got what it takes to overtake the high-end music phones market and it is our job to see how it performs in every possible aspect.

The Sony Ericsson W950 seems like the utmost music phone in its pure form. The whopping 4GB of internal memory are enough to store all the tracks you love to listen to. The addition of dedicated music keys that come alive when you start the player is just great. Moreover, all this comes in a rather compact body.

Although the 4GB of storage memory might make you think of Nokia N91, in fact the Nokia handset has more to offer such as a 2 megapixel camera and Wi-Fi. Nevertheless, N91 is much bigger and weighs a hefty 50 g more. Therefore, there is no room for comparison between the two and we would not make such attempt in our review.

The Sony Ericsson W950 retail package includes a USB cable and a Walkman stereo headset with a remote control. Of course, as with any other mobile phone, the contents of the retail package remain strictly market and country dependant.

The music player is the same as the one used in the Walkman-branded Sony Ericsson phones. Well, not quite. In fact, Sony Ericsson W950 boasts one of the most developed music players we have seen in a mobile phone. Of course, it supports playlists with shuffle and loop options while offering the usual equalizer presets including the Walkman MegaBass one. The dedicated music player key on the keypad along with the multimedia keys, that come alive once you have started the player, really make the life easier for the user - not that we would expect any less than that when we are talking about a Walkman-branded mobile.

Nice innovations are the several animated background visualizations, which are a very nice touch, by the way. An added way to sort all your music is by using the added rating and mood designations. First, you can add ratings to the songs and then filter the available tracks by their rating. The mood designation, on the other hand, means that after adding a corresponding mood to your tracks you can later on filter the songs and virtually listen only to those that suit your current mood.

In the end, it all comes to your priorities. Sony Ericsson W950 is a great smartphone, a great phone, and a great music player. That is if you don’t expect your mobile phone to take pictures and you are not much into messaging. That great display would have put to a good use a Wi-Fi capability but it would have added to the price.

It’s up to you to decide whether this is the right smartphone for you, but if you are into listening to music, the Sony Ericsson W950 is among the best solutions on the market.

Read the full review on gsmarena.

It has been over a year since Sony Ericsson last released a 3G folder. But even still, the new Z610i came with a surprise or two. First off, people did not expect a mid-range 3G clamshell this early. Secondly, people did not expect it to be available on the market so shortly after its launch announcement.

The Sony Ericsson Z610i is not meant to be a successor of the Z800, instead it is targeted towards fashion conscious consumers. Stripping off the style, the device is essentially a folder version of the K610i: both being mid-range 3G devices and sharing virtually the same specifications.

The guys at mobileburn made a review of the phone and here are some of their impressions. The Sony Ericsson Z610i is shiny and sleek. No matter which color your chose, blue, pink, or dark brown, the surface would shine like a mirror. In fact, the curves and the color scheme give the device the look of a drop of mercury over a pebble.

Using the same trick as Sony Network Walkman devices, the external OLED hides itself under the reflective cover surface when it's off, and only shows through the surface when it's on. When it does, it is gorgeous. Of course, the bad thing is that the reflective surface attracts fingerprints like you have never seen before, and it is actually quite easy to scratch, more so than the Nokia 8800. I would suggest protecting the phone with a pouch made for sunglasses.

The main display in the Sony Ericsson Z610i is a 2" 262K color, 176x220 pixel TFD screen. The screen is bright, but more pixilated than the K750i's because of its larger size. The colors also looks less vivid. When comparing it to the Sharp 903, the screen on Z610 looks blue'ish, and the yellows looks muddy (greener). But of course this is not too obvious unless you compare them side-by-side. You will have no problem using the main display under direct sunlight, but the external display will be completely unreadable because of the reflections. Just for the record, the external display is a 128x36 pixel OLED.

Out of the two cameras, only the external one can be used to take pictures. The internal one, next to the earpiece, is reserved for video conferencing. The main camera is a fixed focus 2MP CMOS module. You can turn the night mode on if needed, you can also choose from a list of preset white balances. Time stamp and self-timer can be enabled, and there are also some fun special effects and a panorama mode that stitches up three pictures together. The shutter sound cannot be silenced.

Out of the two cameras, only the external one can be used to take pictures. The internal one, next to the earpiece, is reserved for video conferencing. The main camera is a fixed focus 2MP CMOS module. You can turn the night mode on if needed, you can also choose from a list of preset white balances. Time stamp and self-timer can be enabled, and there are also some fun special effects and a panorama mode that stitches up three pictures together. The shutter sound cannot be silenced.

The conclusion is that the Z610i is a capable midrange 3G phone, though overall it leans a bit more towards "design" rather than "function." The most obvious example of that would be the keypad. In trying to fit into the role of a fashion phone, the price has been raised similar Sony Ericsson handsets, putting it close to Motorola's KRZR.

If you are looking strictly at functionality, the Z610 would not embarrass anyone either. With the excellent reception, full HTML browser, good battery life and multimedia capabilities, this device should be a reasonable companion during your day. The phone does everything reasonably well, but there really is not much that sets it apart other than the exterior design.

If you are looking for even higher specifications, you can look into the Sony Ericsson K800 or Nokia N73. For midrange 3G folders, you can either go for the cheaper LG ones, or devices from Sharp if they're available in your country. For the rest of us, the decision is rather straight forward: it is either the Z610 or the Motorola KRZR. It is simply a matter of taste.

Read full review on mobileburn.

Here is the Sony Ericsson SO902iWP+. What does WP come from? Well...water proof. Now the question is "Why do I need a water proof phone?". The answer is simple...you don't. Unless you really have to talk in the shower or you are too clumsy to hang on to the phone while using the toilet. As the guys from gadgetell said, I need this kind of phone as much as I need a pen that writes underwater.

Talking serious, the handset comes with a 1.3 megapixel camera and a mp3 player. So the Sony Ericsson SO902iWP+ water proof phone is not so bad and it is a good solutions for those of us who are more clumsy.

Via gadgetell.

Sony Ericsson announced the W300 back in February of 2006. It was the seventh Walkman phone in the series that focuses on a great music experience on top of a mobile phone. Along side of the Sony Ericsson W600 and the W810i, which are the higher-end models in the series, the W300i comes in a compact clamshell form with the Walkman music hardware controls, support for a wide variety of music formats and a Memory Stick Micro expansion slot.

This quad-band GSM world phone sports EDGE for data, a VGA camera, an integrated FM radio, stereo audio, Bluetooth, Java for 3D gaming and syncing to desktop via PC Suite. That’s a sweet laundry list for a feature phone that sells for an affordable price. Cingular will likely announce this phone at CTIA around September 12, 2006 in the US. If you can’t wait or prefer another GSM carrier, you can buy the phone directly from Sony Ericsson’s web site for $299 unlocked, which means you can pop in your own SIM to use it.

MobileTechReview made a review of this phone and here are some of their impressions: Sony Ericsson pleased us with the W810i’s great camera quality that could rival some high-end Nokia camera phones. Alas the W300i is a lower end phone and has only a VGA camera with 4x digital zoom. The picture quality is quite good by VGA camera standards. You will notice a bit of the usual VGA camera phone noise in photos, but the color saturation is very good and colors are more balanced compared to many other VGA cameras, though it has a slight pink color tint.

You can turn up the brightness for poorly lit areas but you will get some whiteout on reflective surfaces and white objects in your pictures. The camera can take still photos at 640 x 480, 320 x 240 and 160 x 120 resolutions. It has two picture quality settings and several shooting modes including normal, panorama, frames and burst mode. All the sample photos are taken in Fine quality at 640 x 480 resolution.

The W300i’s camera can also take videos with audio in 3gp format and you can take video at either 176 x 144 or 128 x 96 resolution. The video quality is good for a VGA camera with no blocky distortion or frame jumps and the audio is in sync with the video.

The conclusion is that the Sony Ericsson W300i is a very capable feature phone that’s easy to use and small enough to live in any pocket. The full Walkman treatment makes it easy to use the phone as a casual music player, though it can’t compete with iPod’s higher music storage capacity and even better fidelity. If you are looking for an affordable GSM clamshell phone with good phone features and connection capabilities, you should give the W300i a look, especially if music is your thing.


Read full review here.