Thread: Sony-Ericsson W910i Mobile Phone

The W910i is the latest in the Walkman series of phones from Sony Ericsson. It comes with a new media-browsing interface, and an inbuilt motion sensor for games and music. The slim W910i employs a smooth slider mechanism. The front facia is dominated by a (huge!) 2.4-inch LCD screen-strikingly beautiful, and it remains perfectly legible even in direct sunlight. The navigational keys include a small steel five-way rocker which doubles up as the Playback control when using media player, and two soft menu keys.

Two additional keys are placed near the top, which are configured for the photo album by default; they can be used while gaming as well. The flat keypad lacks tactile feedback and feels mushy-not good if you SMS a lot. The Power On and Walkman buttons at the top are rather difficult to operate. Music is the forte of the W910i. Playback quality is awesome; the bundled earphones are simply superb, plus you can use any 3.5 mm earphones you'd like. Two features have been added, called Shake control and SenseMe. Shake Control, as the name suggests, implies the use of motion sensors (gyroscopes, to be precise) to control music playback.

Shake the phone in one direction to switch to the next track and in the other direction for the previous track-you've no doubt seen this in the advertisements for the phone. The feature works overall, but it needs refinement. SenseMe is a kind of media browser where tracks are sorted by tempo (like fast or slow) and mood (happy or sad). For a song to be tagged with the right mood, it needs to be uploaded via the Media Manager application (otherwise it remains hidden from SenseMe).

The camera on the W910i is decent, but not the best; you'd have expected SE to do better. As with all 2MP cameras, it performs better outdoors; image quality decreases with light. Video recording is okay. The phone itself is typical SE-a simple user interface and snappy performance. A 2 GB card is included, and you also get a USB reader with this phone. The only gripe we had with the phone was the keypad, which has no tactile feedback, and feels like the buttons on washing machines. The W910i is easily the best of the W series of phones from SE. Retailing at Rs 18,899, we'd recommend the W910i to someone looking for a suave, slim music phone.