Sony Ericsson W760 review: Walkman meets GPS

Multimedia in the spotlight

The W760 Media center menu allows one-click access to available the Photos, Music, Videos, Games, Web Feeds, and Video streams. The current pick is highlighted and the count of included files is displayed. Since the W760 is equipped with a built-in accelerometer, the Media center menu rotates automatically to match the handset orientation - much like the Sony Ericsson K850.

That functionality is at hand in the integrated Picture gallery, Music player and Video player too. You can also set a fixed orientation of the Media center in case the auto rotation feature is bugging you.

Photos with TimeLine view

Тhe Photo gallery is currently among the most advanced to be found in a feature phone. It's a convenient tool for managing a vast collection of camera photos with great customization capabilities.

From here you get access to the latest snapshot you've taken, your camera album in timeline view, and the rest of your images, such as wallpapers, etc. You can also tag photos with custom tags that can later on be used for filtering, and finally, you can access favorite photo feeds straight from here (that's a new one!).

The Timeline view the Camera Album offers displays image thumbs filtered by the month they've been taken. When you highlight a photo it gets a bit larger for better viewing.

Photo viewer in Media center

When browsing the images fullscreen, the next in line doesn't simply open up but slides in from left or right instead. This is a minor but pleasant novelty in the Media Center, which we first spotted in the Sony Ericsson W890. Again, when exiting the full screen view of a picture, it smoothly zooms out to thumb view. We were pleased to find that viewing images one by one didn't involve any lags at all.

You can zoom in to the actual size of an image.

Browsing images fullscreen • zooming in on a photo

Slideshows created by Sony Ericsson W760 are excellent - before they start, you get to pick a mood and the handset plays the animated slide shows with background music to suit the chosen mood. The transition style of the slideshow also varies according to the mood.

The only thing we miss with those slideshows is the ability to export those as video files. Of course, a few extra customization options would also have come in handy - like for example choosing background music of your own or choosing among tracks defined as appropriate by the SensMe mood-assigning feature. Of course, there's always the VideoDJ application for editing together photos by applying background music and custom transition effects.

Setting up your next slideshow • creating a video slideshow in VideoDJ

Editing a photo in PhotoDJ is not the same positive experience we're used to, as its interface has been downgraded much like the camera one, which we will speak of later.

PhotoDJ application has nice correction and effects options

Music player with Shake Control and SensMe

The Sony Ericsson W760 features the Walkman 3.0 player with the SensMe feature. The player supports numerous file formats and has several equalizer presets. Beside all that, you also get Album art and the proprietary Sony Ericsson Shake control thanks to the phone's built-in accelerometer.

As with previous versions the music player offers step-by-step filtering of the tracks you want to hear. A genuine Walkman phone, Sony Ericsson W760 has a dedicated key to start the music player and has a dedicated Walkman icon in the main menu - plus, you can access the player through the Media center.

Media center and its music section: filtering music

The Walkman 3.0 "Now playing" interface is simple and intuitive. The D-pad is in charge of the music controls and also brings up a list of all the tracks in the current playlist or album.

The player is also able to display Album art - you can swap that for some of the graphical visualizations that are available. The visualizations themselves are nothing special and are squeezed in the same square that would show the Album Art.

The Walkman 3.0 music player interface: Album Art or visualization • browsing playlist during playback • player options

When you minimize the music player, the currently playing track and its artist get displayed on the home screen with some nice fullscreen graphical visualizations that are part of the graphical Flash lite theme used.

Music playback on the standby screen comes with rich graphics

What managed to surprise us with the W760 is the new way of representing the equalizer presets. Instead of a list and some graphical bars for the frequency bands, there are now fullscreen graphics to go with each equalizer. Creating a custom equalizer is also possible.

Some of the available equalizer presets • you can also create one of your own (without cutting off the Bass frequencies)

Shake control is the heavily marketed feature that we first saw in Sony Ericsson W580. With Shake control on, you press-and-hold the Walkman key to skip or shuffle tracks with a flick of the hand.

With W760 the Shake control is much smoother and refined, as compared to W910 and you no longer need to jerk the phone hard to get it to work. Plus the Walkman key is on the side instead on the top, so it's much easier to press-and-hold it.

"...What managed to surprise us with the W760 is the new way of representing the equalizer presets. Instead of a dull list and some graphical bars for the frequency bands, there are now fullscreen graphics to go with each equalizer...."

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SensMe, the other high pitched Walkman goodie, is an alternative way to browse your music collection by searching music that matches your current mood instead of looking for a specific artist or album.

The interface is original and visually appealing. Tracks appear as dots placed along a horizontal and a vertical mood axis. You can circle a group of tracks that match your mood to create a playlist. You are also able to broaden or shrink the selection.

The SensMe interface

Unfortunately, you are not able to assign mood to your tracks by yourself, and also copying your tracks in a more conventional way would simply make them invisible for the SensMe matrix.

In order to make use of the SensMe filtering feature, you need to upload your music to the phone via the Sony Ericsson Media Manager software for PC. You also need to have the SensMe Analysis ticked in the Media Manager in order to make use of it.

A certain shortcoming is that performing the SensMe analysis during track upload makes things a lot slower in terms of transfer rate. It would have been nice if you could just leave it work its magic throughout the night and analyze you whole PC music collection instead of waiting every time you upload new music to the phone.

The only workaround to that is to leave your memory card connected to the Media Manager via a card reader and let the program take its time analyzing and uploading music without leaving your handset connected to the PC for an indefinite time - analyzing and uploading 2GB worth of music may take over an hour (it's that slow!).

FM radio with RDS and TrackID

The integrated FM radio of Sony Ericsson W760 has memory for 20 stations and supports RDS. It doesn't make use of equalizer presets, but has the TrackID music recognition service integrated. The radio can be minimized in the background much like the music player but offers none of the fancy fullscreen graphics.

Tuning to a FM station

Video player snaps screenshots

The video player supports fast-forwarding and rewinding, as well as playing clips in slow motion. Another fun feature is capturing screenshots of a chosen scene. The player interface is simple but stylish and user-friendly enough.

The video player

Streaming video with YouTube

The TV department in the media center allows you to watch online video clips directly from YouTube. Recently featured, most viewed and top rated clips are just a few clicks away. Sadly, searching is not supported.

The TV department in Media center plays YouTube video clips