Sony Ericsson W950 review: Let the music play

Phonebook is cool

The Sony Ericsson W950 offers an extensive phonebook designed to suit everybody’s needs. It can store unlimited amount of numbers. You can choose to filter your contacts by groups; by the location, they are saved at; or separate them into individual folders that later on you can use for calls management. The default filter applied shows the contacts saved in the phone’s memory.

Contacts list • applying list filters • filtering calls

The details that you can save for a given contact are abundant and include several numbers and email addresses, job title, office and home postal addresses, voice commands for the individual phone numbers of the contact and finally you can associate a ringtone and a picture to the specific contact. There is a field to enter the contact’s birthday and contrary to Sony Ericsson W950, the entered date does get transferred to the Calendar. A nice feature is that you can add your own custom fields.

Contact Dexter’s details

You can even add a note for every contact. As usual, the font size throughout the most of the smartphone’s interface can be zoomed in. That’s a great feature for people that no longer enjoy their full-strength eyesight. Otherwise, the smallest of the font sizes is pretty legible.

Adding a sample note for Dexter

Call management

The Call log lists store all the information about the calls received or made.

Outgoing calls list • a specific call details

Now, when it comes to call management, besides call filtering there are also two nice options. The first one is to set the smartphone to send a SMS with a predefined text whenever you have to reject a call. The second one is to automatically store a callback event in the calendar every time your reject a call. In case you choose that option, you can set how many minutes after the call the call back event should alert you.

Setting up the Reject with SMS option • setting the call back option

But when you want it written

Usually the messaging department is one of strongest ones in any smartphone. Sony Ericsson W950 doesn’t make any exception to the rule. It offers rich functions combined with several text-input options. You can enter text with the numeric keypad in the usual Multi-Tap way, use the virtual QWERTY keyboard with the stylus or simply write with the stylus on the screen. As regards handwriting recognition, the phone manages very well. If you feel uncomfortable with it, you can always turn on the virtual keyboard, which is rather easy to use and offers different layouts. The Sony Ericsson W950 also offers an enhanced version of the T9 dictionary – its thesaurus is expandable – you can add your own words and it can even remember whole messages.

Setting up text input options

The messaging menu combines all messages in one inbox. The supported messages are SMS, EMS, MMS, email, and RSS feeds. The last one is available through a dedicated application. Writing a sms with the plethora of input methods available is rather easy. Furthermore, you have a lot of emoticons to express graphically your feelings.

Shared Inbox • using the virtual keypad • SMS emoticons • EMS emoticons

The font size in the conventional messages can be varied according to your needs.

The email client is not really a separate application. It has extensive options but setting it up to work with your email account is rather easy. It supports the POP3, IMAP and SMTP protocols, as well as SSL and TLS encryption. Writing an email is as simple as writing a standard sms message. Usually the client downloads only the email headers or you can set it up to automatically download the whole messages if they don’t exceed a predefined limit in kilobytes. Adding an attachment is easy as usual – all you have to do is open the corresponding tab in the “new email” editor.

Email account settings

Manipulating the contents

The Sony Ericsson W950 has 64MB flash memory and 64MB RAM besides the 4GB available as a separate storage space. There is no way to expand the memory by using a memory card.

The smartphone offers a nice file manager, which resembles a lot the interface of the file managers of Sony Ericsson non–OS phones. It has two tabs – one showing the folders in the phone’s memory (no system files visible) and another one showing the files and folders on the 4GB storage memory. You can mark multiple files or folders and then copy, move or send them to another device. There is full support for DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection. It can be applied to all types of multimedia content such as audio, video, images and Java midlets.

Browsing folders • folder context menu • Other folder • available space

Browsing through pictures though, is much easier through the Picture gallery application. It offers almost the same folders & files interface as the file manager but it has some additional options as well as several view settings. You can browse the pictures in portrait or landscape mode. You can also set whether you want the pictures in portrait mode to be seen fullscreen. When browsing in landscape mode the fullscreen is the only available option. Of course, you can zoom in the pictures to their original size and even more. When zooming, a mini-map appears which allows you to see which picture area you are looking at.

List view • picture context menu • viewing a picture: normal and fullscreen