Sony Ericsson W960 review: Walkman extreme

Sony Ericsson W960 is aptly the big gun in the Sony Ericsson portfolio of music-centered handsets. Gifted with the scorching 8GB of storage space and a large touchscreen TFT display, a 3-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi and 3G capabilities, the W960 easily stands out in the Walkman crowd. Powered by the Symbian OS and UIQ user interface, it delivers one-of-a-kind Walkman experience with rich fullscreen visualizations and advanced track filtering. All this is enough to have us drooling over the specs sheet, eager to get our hands on this smarty Walkman and see what it's made of.

Sony Ericsson W960 official photos

Key features:

• Walkman Touch music player
• Symbian OS 9.1 with UIQ 3.0
• 3G support with video calls
• Wi-Fi support
• 3 megapixel camera with autofocus
• 8GB of storage space
• Dedicated touch-sensitive player keys
• 262K color TFT touchscreen display
• FM radio

Main disadvantages:

• Not as impressive in life as in the promotional photos
• Slow interface response as storage gets nearly used up
• Back key location changed
• No memory card slot (yeah, we know it has 8GB of internal memory)
• Music player cannot sort tracks by filename
• No EDGE support

The Sony Ericsson W960 is the successor of Sony Ericsson W950, which came with 4GB of integrated memory, but failed to gain popularity for the lack of camera and Wi-Fi capabilities. In fact, featurewise the W960 resembles more the Sony Ericsson P1 - they are almost identical in terms of hardware (although the P1 has an Infrared port, which lacks in W960). The W960 features the same 208MHz processor and the same amount of RAM - 128MB. However, the W960 boasts a dedicated Walkman key, three touch-sensitive keys for controlling the music player and, finally, that all-important Walkman home screen application with fullscreen visualizations. You probably are as excited as we are about this review, so let's not waste any more time and get on to it, shall we?

Sony Ericsson W960 review shots