Unboxing the Sony Ericsson W960, first impressions

Here’s a video of me unboxing the Sony Ericsson W960 which I received at UIQ’s developer Fast Track in Budapest last week. The phone basically being a Walkman® smartphone has a slick design being glossy-black on the front and somewhat rubber-matte on the backside. The sides are tastefully white colored and the phone just feels great in the hand with it’s 109 x 55 x 16 millimeters weighting 119 grams. I can’t help comparing it with my Nokia’s N95 8GB which now seems like a brick. This phone will not replace my N95 (it’s now even close as powerful as the Nokia and shouldn’t be compared to it) but will be a great ’spare time device’. The SE W960 runs on Symbian OS and the UIQ interface.

The W960 is an orgie of input possibilities with a jog dial on the left side, a touchscreen which both makes use of a stylus and good old fingerplay as well as a traditional keyboard. The ‘hardkeys’ are however way to hard. My thumb almost cramps when I try to type a text using the keyboard which rarely happens as the stylus input is great once you get a hold of it. There’s also dedicated softkeys for the Walkman® application allowing the user to easily play, pause, switch, fast forward and rewind the music.

The screen is 2.6 inches and runs at 240×320 pixels (QVGA). Surprisingly it works quite well even in hard sunlight (I’ll have to do more testing on that when I write the proper review), but it is possible to distinguish a square pattern all over the screen if you try to look real hard. I should also mention the 3.2 megapixel camera and the 8GB internal memory for all your music.

A proper review yet to come…