Sony Ericsson roundup: W902, W595, W302 preview

User interface

The W595 user interface is the same as on the W902 - user-friendly, quick and with a lot of available options and settings.

The support of Flash Lite themes lets you customize the interface of your W595 all over. The menus and the general layout is also the same as in W902 and in fact we didn't manage to find any difference between the two UIs.

Sony Ericsson W595 comes with the three soft key layout and the Activity menu, which means multi-tasking is enabled. And as all the positives of the W902 apply to the W595, so do the negatives - a SIM card is required even if you plan to use the phone in flight mode only.

Multimedia

The music player of Sony Ericsson W595 is also the same as the one on the W902. You can go a page back if you need to refresh your knowledge about it. All the niceties are also here - the SenseMe music browsing, the Shake control and the automatic screen rotation, thanks to the built-in accelerometer.

Another common element of the W902 and the W595 is the picture gallery. It is surely one of the best we've found in a mobile phone. It's a convenient tool for managing a vast collection of pictures with great customization capabilities and features.

Some of those options include: one-click access to the latest snapshot you've taken, timeline view for your images and tags that can later be used for filtering. With Sony Ericsson W595 you can also mark some of your photos as favorite and make accessing them even easier through the favorite photo feed. Furthermore, the gallery is extremely eye-pleasing with nice transition effects being all over.

The Sony Ericsson W595 has a really nice gallery

True to their Walkman nature, the Sony Ericsson W595 and W902 really know how to make a nice slide show. It prompts picking a mood before you start, so it can set the proper background music and transition effects.

Sony Ericsson W595 also has kept the FM radio functionality of the W902. This means that RDS and TrackID come on board and so does memory for 20 stations.

The FM radio interface

Camera

Sony Ericsson W595 features a 3 megapixel fixed focus camera with no flash whatsoever. The specs suggest that this is not the best part of the phone but users still have an imaging option at hand.

The camera interface is surely the best part of the shooting with the W595. Once again we have to say it - the Cyber-shot interface does take shooting with your mobile phone a level up.

Here are the sample photos from Sony Ericsson W595 camera:

Having a mind we are dealing with a pre-release unit here, we found the W595 photos to be extremely oversharpened. That usually ruins the photos and we guess it will be fine tuned before the official release.

Beside that the W595 failed to nail the correct white balance - all photos have a colder white balance than the original scene. The level of detail however is satisfactory and there are no traces of purple fringing, which is commendable, as purple fringing have been plaguing Sony Ericsson cameraphones for quite some time now.

As far as the video recording capabilities are concerned, the Sony Ericsson W595 manages the modest QVGA resolution at 15 fps. Needless to say, clips at such resolution and frame rate are rarely usable, so don't count on this handset replacing your current camcorder.

Sony Ericsson W595 preview conclusion

Sony Ericsson W595 is probably the handset that managed to please us most today. It has the performance of its bigger brother - the W902 and almost all its features (save for the camera part). However the W595 does look a whole lot neater and sharper and, having in mind that it will be targeted at a lower segment, it has some great potential.

If we are to answer if Sony Ericsson produced a worthy successor of the W580 - they certainly did.

The only thing that Sony Ericsson need to worry about is the release date of the W595. With at least three more months to go, the competition in this market segment might even get more severe than it is now.

Now join us after the jump for the final piece of Sony Ericsson gear that we are previewing today - the W302. Who knows - the cute bar might just turn out to be a great surprise.