Sony Ericsson W950 review: Let the music play

But it can do a lot more

The Alarms application is nothing special really but it does its job more than satisfactory. You can set a ringtone of your choice as an Alarm sound or you can have a given radio station to wake you.

The functionality of the Calendar application is at a good level. You can choose between monthly, weekly and daily view and two time zones. The available events that you can store are Appointment, Reminder, All day event, and Anniversary. The birthday can be recorded as an Anniversary event since those events are repeated automatically through the years.

Calendar: monthly, weekly and daily view

As with any other Sony Ericsson phones you have two other applications to organize your daily routine – that is the Tasks and Notes applications. The Task one allows you to enter simple events that do not require extensive setups as the ones in the Calendar. The Notes application allows saving short notes as the name itself implies. The interesting thing here is that the notes can be in handwritten form. When using the regular input method, the predictive text input mode is available.

Tasks • normal note • handwritten text note • handwritten drawing note

The W950 also offers a nicely designed Calculator, Unit converter and a Sound Recorder with a recording time only limited by the available memory. Sony Ericsson has decided to leave the MusicDJ application seen on almost all of their mobile phones – it allows you to create polyphonic ringtones within a simple user interface. For an unknown reason the VideoDJ application seen on some of the latest Sony Ericsson mobiles lacks here.

Calculator • Unit converter • Sound recorder • MusicDJ

Maybe this is the most appropriate place to say a few things about the Task Manager, which is something of a separate application although fully integrated into the OS. The Task Manager icon is available in the upper right angle of the screen almost throughout the whole smartphone interface. You probably have noticed that on almost all of our screenshots. Unfortunately, the icon itself is so small that the only way to press it is by using the stylus.

The Task Manager has two tabs – the first and default one, which you see whenever you open the Manager contains shortcuts to the Main Menu and the Activity menu as well as access to the recently used application. The second tab of the Task Manager contains all the currently running applications and allows you to terminate them easily.

Shortcut tab of the Manager • Running applications tab

Unfortunately, the Sony Ericsson W950 doesn’t have the Quickoffice application preinstalled which would allow it to open or even edit MS Word, MS Excel and MS PowerPoint documents. According to us, it is a great disadvantage since every smartphone should be able to deal with office documents. Of course, you can always add such an application but usually you have to pay for it.

Strategic gaming

The Sony Ericsson W950 comes with two preinstalled games. The first one is the Tetris-like QuadraPop game seen on many other Sony Ericsson phones. We must point out though, that it is an enhanced version of the game with a serious face lifting done to its interface.

The second game is Nightclub Empire, which is a sort of a tycoon game where you start as an owner of a nightclub and begin developing it as a business.

W950 games

Final words

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.