Sony Ericsson W950i (5)

Looking back on my review of the W950i leaves me with an interesting thought. If the W950i had been a bad phone, there wouldn’t have been as much to write about. The length and depth is a testament to just how good it  actually is. The W950i is not perfect though, and if Sony Ericsson can keep the focus groups and designers on track, the W950i mk 2 is going to (hopefully) get a lot of the kinks out of the system.

Speaking of The Kinks (well, it is a music phone) it is the Walkman branding that is going to sell the phone, and the application that (naturally) sums up the phone… “the little walkman that could”. There’s no doubt that the Walkman functionality in the phone is an absolute killer. 4GB measures up nicely to the iPod Nano and the other music-based smartphones on the market. Having a keypad to help you search for music is a huge advantage over a scroll wheel or list, and being able to use the handwriting recognition to find a track is more of a real leap forward.

While the W950i is the sixth Walkman smartphone in the Sony Ericsson range, it is the first UIQ powered one, and to be honest it does feel more like a first generation device rather than sixth. Sony Ericsson has kept a lot of the UI from the existing Walkman phones. Which explains the initial layout of the icons on the application launcher, but not why we can’t alter the layout to what the end user wants.

I have stressed in the review (see links above) that the W950i is geared to a specific target audience, I think that there’s just a little too much focus on replicating similar styled phones. The earlier Walkman phones may be regarded as non-smartphones, but they still packed a lot of functionality. People coming to this device are going to expect something a bit more than a dumb phone, even those upgrading from the W900. And I think Sony Ericsson have gone too far in their quest to try and hide as much complexity of the UIQ interface and make the music the unique selling point when marketing the device. This is missing the whole idea of a smartphone.

If I wanted something that only played music, my choices are legion. If I want a phone that plays MP3, I’ve a huge range of medium to low end phones. If I want something that can do music, my email, my diary, play a few games, read my RSS feeds, pretend to run a nightclub, have hundreds of third party apps (eventually) loaded into the device – then the W950i is the best phone to do it in.

The W950i is pitched as a Walkman Phone with Extras. It’s much more than that. And while some of the applications are a touch rough at the edges, you could happily use the W950i as your pocket computer during the day. The crunch for me is what I’m going to do now the big review articles are over. Does the W950i stay in my pocket for day to day use, or does it sit on the desk for compatibility testing?

It’s staying in my pocket. For every little thing that annoys me, there’s something else nice about the device. The weight for one (it’s incredibly light compared to some of the ‘phones’ that I carry around). The gorgeous QVGA screen. And there’s the battery life, which just about exceeded my best expectation. Sure, I’d love an update to the firmware to get round its little foibles, but for now it’s the little bundle of entertainment that keeps me happy!

Source: http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/Sony_Ericsson_W950i_part_4-summing_up.php

Sony Ericsson W950i (4)

PIM

The big four management apps are the PIM applications – your Contacts, Calendar, Notes and Tasks/to-do’s. What is important to a user here is two-fold. The first is the ability to find the information he needs on his phone as fast as possible; the second is getting the information both into the phone and taking out the changes.

Synchronising the data is very easy – hook up the phone and your PC, and the Sony Ericsson PC Suite will get to work and match up all your Outlook data with that on the device. It’s incredibly fast, simple, and can be set up to do so automatically – and while I’m old fashioned enough to not have the auto-sync box ticked, I have every confidence that it would work.

What I don’t have confidence in using is Notes and Tasks. On my Outlook installation I have these spit out into categories (or folders). So I have one set of tasks in the folder (AAS UIQ), some in (AAS Podcast), some in (Shopping) and some in (Local Radio). None of this information is transferred over to the W950. I could be fair and point out that no other UIQ or S60 phone handles this – but on the other hand it’s something that Palm OS and Windows Mobile have had worked out from day one.

It’s even more irksome here in UIQ 3 because the Tasks and Notes applications actually have a folder system, yet it has no relation to the folder information that the PC could offer at sync time! I’m not going to enter my information twice (not with the amount of balls I juggle at once), I’m just going to not bother using the applications unless I really have to, and remember to move any new items from ‘unfiled’ to where they need to go when I get to my PC.

However, for the review, I persevered. Underneath the organisational problems, these apps are incredibly similar, and are pretty easy to use – in fact the only difference in the Notes application compared to the Tasks application is the appearance of the tick boxes and priority numbers. Underneath, each app has two screens – tasks has a screen for text and a screen for setting information such as the priority of tasks and when it started and when it finished. Notes has the same text screen, and a second page for ‘doodles,’ essentially a basic sketch application.

I will take my hat off to the Calendar application though. It makes great use of the screen, especially in the default view – with a month view and little squares showing an entry, and a breakdown of the highlighted day at the bottom of the screen. Click through on a day from the scroll wheel and you get taken to the day view, where you can choose and edit an entry, or move to an empty space and enter a new appointment. Again we have a tabbed dialog with the most important information at the top, and then extra info on subsequent tabs.

I like that this tabbed dialog is the same over all the PIM applications – I know that the idea of a consistent interface is drilled into the programmers and developers in the Symbian OS world, but for someone coming to the system new, this is vitally important. You learn one application, and your common sense will show you how to use the others.

Onto the final PIM app, and it’s probably the key in any smartphone… Contacts. Your phone numbers, email addresses, web URLs and other details of all your acquaintances are in here – the proverbial little black book in the modern world. Unfortunately, for me Contacts fails in one common sense way that has me a touch frustrated, and it’s in its search function.

You have to be super careful when searching for names. Just as in the music application, you can only search from the beginning of the string, not for text in the middle. By default the W950 sorts by surname and then first name. This means if I look for “Rafe” then I can’t find him. Put in part of his surname (Blandford) and you’re fine. Now you can switch that round to first name then surname, but then RAF works and BLA doesn’t.

With the processing power behind the W950, surely this is something that is easily rectified? Apart from this, the contacts application runs on the same rails as the other PIM applications, talks nicely to the PC Suite with your data, and is generally pretty reliable.

It’s worth pointing out that while the W950’s PC Suite is only for Windows, it talks to both Microsoft Outlook, Windows Address Book, Lotus Notes and Lotus Organiser.

Getting Online

For those of you buying the device SIM free, the W950 uses Sony Ericsson’s automatic configurer, so you can go the Sony Ericsson web site, tell it your network and phone number, and you’ll get your settings sent over the air to you [NB. the same basically applies to any other phone these days – Ed] – hey presto, one configured phone. Your network provider should be able to do the same if you’ve bought it on a contract. It’s a good system, not as ‘plug and play’ simple as reading the SIM card and checking an internal database (as Nokia do) but it means that any errors in the setup, or new systems, can be easily accommodated by Sony Ericsson.

Hardcore (Old Skool) users can still enter and tweak everything by hand in the Control panel, of course – although the settings are spread over quite a number of dialog boxes and areas.

Email and Messaging

Setting up your email, perhaps counter intuitively, is also done in Control panel, although at least you have a shortcut in the menu system of the actual Messaging menu. As is becoming the norm, all your incoming messages will end up here, be they SMS, MMS, emails or received files over Bluetooth. Each email inbox has its own top level folder – and these folders can be set to refresh automatically at regular intervals to check for new messages and potentially download the headers or the first few K of any messages – think of it as a poor man’s push email and you’ll be there.

Unfortunately, the W950 doesn’t come with viewers for Microsoft Office files, so when you get that Word or Sheet document in the mail, you’re not going to be able to read it – it’s text only I’m afraid. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, as the target market for the W950 will not be looking for Office support, and it can easily be added by third party software if needed.

Web Browser

The other main Internet component on the W950 is the Web browser – it’s actually Opera v8.0, and it’s a very good mobile browser. Where Nokia’s current browser’s goal is to replicate how a web page would look on a ‘full’ browser, Opera is more interested in presenting you with all the information in readable form – this involves the Opera Small Screen Rendering engine to take into account both the content of a web page and the size of your screen. I like the fact that it does its level best to eradicate the need to scroll left and right – which means the scroll wheel is a great way to navigate through pages – and the strengths of the touch screen become very obvious when you are navigating links with the stylus.

All this can be toggled off and Opera will render the page normally – sometimes needed with complicated layouts that just don’t lend themselves well to repurposing. You can also switch to a landscape mode – sometimes this makes pages a bit easier, but the ergonomics of the W950 make it uncomfortable to use for long periods.

The Web browser does what it needs to do and does it well – there are no flashy graphics, slides or transitions. It’s functional and fast, and that’s good enough for me.

The Incidental Apps

As well as the major applications, the W950 ships with 27 seperate application icons. While not integral to the phone, they provide some great extra functionality – previously you would expect these to be delivered by third party software – but they are now bundled in alongside the core applications. A few of the highlights for me were…

A basic RSS reader – great for checking a few web sites, but without an import function it’s not going to read all your feeds. I’d still recommend using the mobile web version of Bloglines (mobile.bloglines.com) or Google Reader (details on how to get started).

The FM Radio provides an alternate source of audio entertainment, but you must have the headset plugged in to act as an aerial. It’s a nice touch, especially as any calls will result in the ringtone interrupting the broadcast so you don’t miss the call.

There are three time-based applications – the standard  Alarm Clock, with three programmable and tickable alarms, hasn’t changed from previous UIQ devices, I just wish that if you set an alarm to an MP3 music track then it would play the whole file and not just loop the first 30 seconds. There is also a Stopwatch (where the counter increases) and a Timer (where the counter decreases). What’s great about the last two is that they are displayed on the Welcome/Home screen, so when you set 25 minutes for something cooking, a quick glance will show where you are up to.

Finally, Nightclub Empire is a small ‘Sims’ like management game where you start with a small pool of money, a deserted nightclub, and trade your way up to the dizzy heights of fame and notoriety.

Source : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/Sony_Ericsson_W950i_part_3-The_Applications.php

Sony Ericsson W950i (3)

The Interface

Lets talk about the user interface. The W950i uses UIQ3, running Symbian OS, a similar set up to the P990 and M600i.

Interfaces are in the news a lot at the moment, and it would be fair to point out that UI design is a thankless job – because everyone is going to have a little thing that they think is wrong and should be done another way. The W950i is no exception, as I’m about to prove.

And I’ll point out that I actually like the W950i – I’ve been using it as my regular phone now for over a month and it’s approaching the point where I know it will work, and I’ll trust it as my main (and sometimes only) device. The fact that I feel it can still improve (and I want it to improve) do show a large commitment to design from Sony Ericsson. But I digress…

UIQ Overview

Fundamentally, the W950i’s UIQ interface is the same as that of the other UIQ3 machines, but with each model having a slight tweak to accommodate the form factor and target audience, there is a certain respect for the end user. For example, the W950i clearly has no flip, so there’s no need to have the standby screen driven by the same system as the P990 uses. It’s also safe to assume that there will be a lot more stylus interaction from the user, so that can be taken into consideration as well.

What I find strange is that while this distinction has been made, there seems to be a reliance on the use of the stylus, with no effective second method. Obviously, Qwerty based devices can use shortcuts to achieve the same functions – on the W950i you sometimes have no choice but to use the touch screen – actually, let me refine that. You sometimes have no choice but to use the stylus. When you’re on the move, the last thing you want is to be pulling out a stylus and trying to target an 8×8 pixel icon at the top of your screen.

Many of the UI features can be found using a nice big thumb (well, this reviewer’s thumb) along the three soft-keys at the base of the screen. Some of these are direct actions to take you to other screens, others call up menus or dialogs where the scroll wheel and click can be used – which is a genuine one handed experience.

But there are just enough functions requiring the accuracy of a stylus in day to day operations that unfortunately mean you have to stop, pull out the stylish (ahem) orange and silver stylus from the rear of the phone to do anything with real depth – and that goes for any decent amount of text entry. Using the keypad and T9 for a standard SMS can be a frustrating experience, and for speed reasons you really do have to switch to the ‘pretty accurate’ character recognition system from CIC – Jot.

Jot hasn’t changed that much since it was made available on the P800 – but we’re still left with this as a single choice. The Windows Mobile based smartphones have a choice of four different handwriting systems, from single letter block recognisers to fully cursive sentence recognition. It would be nice to see if UIQ could develop or licence some of the alternatives. While Jot is accurate, it does take a bit more learning effort on the part of the end user, quite apart from the two-handed stylus use issue.

Using the UI

Let’s start at the home/standby screen. Presenting a tree based guide to your day, you can expand out the tasks, emails and appointments that you have on a daily basis. I found this a great way to present the relevant information. You can see what is waiting, and if you want to expand it out and see more detail, you can, and you don’t need to leave the home screen. The default font (chunky white characters with orange outline) does mean that there’s very little room for text to be displayed in full, but this is highly personal – as you all know, one of my bug bears is wasting screen space with big fonts and no zoom option for the user.

You’ve then got the time and date on display, and apart from the Clock application this is the only place where you can see the time. Okay, whose smart idea was this? The status bar at the top of the screen has more than enough space for a small digital clock (as all the previous Pxxx phones have had). To add this in would bring the W950i into line with pretty much all the regular phones out there, including the existing Sony Ericsson Walkman phones, almost all the Series 60 devices, and more. It’s incredibly frustrating to me to not be able to glance at the screen to get the time. Most UI choices I can justify in my head, but not this one.

Along the bottom of the home screen are five ‘quick access’ icons – these are editable to point to any program you wish, and are big enough so a thumb press will activate the desired program, just like the soft menu keys at the base of the screen. Interestingly, when you first start the W950i there’s yet another Walkman icon, taking pride of place as the first shortcut icon (lest you forget what this phone is really for).  Not surprisingly, that got changed to something far more useful in double-quick time.

Finally, back up to the top of the screen, where you’ve got your status information along the top bar, with signal strength, battery and the task manager icon.

Now I know the idea is to hide as much functionality as possible from the end user, but you still need a task manager to show what applications are running, and to allow easy switching to another application – for example you might want to jump from your ebook reader (after highlighting some text, for example “and it turned out Snape was actually Harry’s father” and email it to Rafe). Without a task manager you would have to press back, back, back to get to the home screen, then two presses to get to the email application. The Task Manager will let you see which programs are currently running, and also shortcut the last few programs that have been launched. Which should lead to a better experience.

But yet again there seems to have been a strange decision in the UI design. Call up the Task Manager and you are not presented with the currently open tasks, but the ‘recent applications’ list. Ehrm, does that make sense? Well it will to some people – first of all it’s likely that your open apps will be one of the last five open (but not guaranteed), and the Main Menu and Standby screens are always listed at the top. It just seems that UIQ have decided to add another tap to a basic computing process. I fail to see why [ – I can see why, I think I’m with Sony Ericsson on this one, for new users, at least – Steve].

The Application Launcher

Much like S60, your applications are printed on screen in a grid of icons, here in a 3×3 format. You can switch this to a list, with a smaller font size (yaay!) that shows ten applications and their names – the icon screen is only the icons themselves, with no annotations – but these icons are thumb sized, so work for the one handed user on the move. Some of the icons are for applications (you just know before I mention it that the Walkman icon is in there), while some of them are folders to more applications (e.g. Organiser leads to three icons, for Calendar, Notes and Tasks).

As well as my first steps with a new phone (see here for the full article), I always like to move my icons around. For example, with a multimedia folder, it makes sense to me to move the Walkman icon into there, and I tend to make the organiser folder a PIM folder, and add in the contacts, messaging and clock applications into it. Except UIQ3 won’t let me do this.

Now I know there are some thing that UI designers choose that need to be fairly fixed, such as the initial layout of the icons on the launcher, but (as a lapsed programmer) I cannot see why you would not provide customisation as an option for the power user. People who would leave the icons alone would never see it, but those that want it would find it. Quite simply, by locking out this functionality for the built in applications, Sony Ericsson are directly reducing my productivity. Every Symbian OS-powered phone from the Nokia 7650 onwards has had a similar icon layout when in my hands. The eBook reader goes in the centre of the screen. The PIM applications have a folder, anything that connects to the Internet goes into another. Extra applications go in a folder labelled “Extras”. And they all live in the same physical location on the screen/grid (I have a similar system, with my own personal layout on all devices, which UIQ3 won’t let me implement – Steve).

Someone in Sony Ericsson has decided not only that they know better than me in laying out the icons, but won’t allow me to change the layout of my icons on my personal phone. You might say this is petty and small minded (“it’s petty and small minded” – shout from the back of the hall) but to me, it’s a potential deal breaker and the one thing on the W950i (and the other UIQ3 devices) that would make me not use these phone in day to day life.

So Why Do I Like It?

Right at the top of the article, I qualified all of this with the note that I actually do like the UIQ interface. First of all it doesn’t make any huge attempts at hiding any information – generally if you want to know some of the technical details then they are available to you (e.g. the Task Manager shows how much RAM a running application is taking; you can access directories and files through the File Manager, you can directly manipulate those directories from your computer, etc).

And let’s not forget the 80/20 rule. Most of my problems with the UI are more things asked for by power users – and we are not the exclusive target demographic for this device. For the majority of people using this device the touch screen, the scroll wheel, and their thumb will be able to access maybe 80-90% of the features of the phone, and that’s more than likely all the functionality they will need.

Smartphones nowadays are highly complex devices, so for any UI to work smoothly is an achievement in itself, and the UIQ interface is very much suited to a device with a lot of applications and potential. The fact that it manages this without complaint is one reason why I like it, and keeping the functions hidden is another.

Summary

So why, on balance, do I find the UIQ3 interface on the W950i a touch annoying? Because it is almost there. If Sony Ericsson take in as much feedback as possible, then it could easily become a magnitude easier to understand and use. Yes, it does do everything that it technically needs to do, but it does not do it all well. When Jeff Hawkins started designing the Palm OS interface he made a simple chart to count the number of taps that any operation was from the main screen – his target then was four taps to anything. Steve Jobs in the recent iPhone launch promised two taps to get to anything (of course he doesn’t have third party apps to worry about [hah – Steve]). The User Interface is set to become a major battleground for mobile devices in the next twelve months as the hardware and capabilities reach a plateau – and the Sony Ericsson W950i is in need of urgent reinforcement.

Source: http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/Sony_Ericsson_W950i_part_2-the_UIQ_Interface.php

Sony Ericsson W950 (2)

Sony Ericsson W950 review: Let the music playThe Sony Ericsson W950 is an exciting new addition to the Walkman series of Sony Ericsson. It is a smartphone based on the Symbian 9.1 UIQ 3.0 with a stylish and yet classical design. Although it doesn’t feature a camera, the 4GB of free space and the dedicated multimedia keys would make any music lover jump from joy. The large touchscreen TFT display with QVGA resolution is just another fascinating feature for the tech buffs. It seems that the W950 has got what it takes to overtake the high-end music phones market and it is our job to see how it performs in every possible aspect.

Sony Ericsson W950 official pictures

Main advantages:

• 4GB of storage space
• Walkman MP3 player and stereo FM radio with RDS
• Dedicated multimedia keys
• 3G support
• Symbian 9.1 OS with the UIQ 3.0 user interface
• Touchscreen with QVGA resolution
• Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP profile, Infrared port and USB 2.0 support
• Comes with a 3.5 mm audio jack adapter

Main disadvantages:

• No camera
• No Wi-Fi
• No memory card slot
• No EDGE support
• Uncomfortable keypad

The Sony Ericsson W950 seems like the utmost music phone in its pure form. The whopping 4GB of internal memory are enough to store all the tracks you love to listen to. The addition of dedicated music keys that come alive when you start the player is just great. Moreover, all this comes in a rather compact body.

Sony Ericsson W950

Although the 4GB of storage memory might make you think of Nokia N91, in fact the Nokia handset has more to offer such as a 2 megapixel camera and Wi-Fi. Nevertheless, N91 is much bigger and weighs a hefty 50 g more. Therefore, there is no room for comparison between the two and we would not make such attempt in our review.

The Sony Ericsson W950 retail package includes a USB cable and a Walkman stereo headset with a remote control. Of course, as with any other mobile phone, the contents of the retail package remain strictly market and country dependant.

The stereo headset that comes in the package in fact is standard one with a 3.5 mm jack. The remote control itself, also bearing the stylish Walkman logo, is an adapter so you may even opt for using your regular 3.5 mm headphones with W950.

W950 retail package stereo headset

The W950 boasts a solid construction and a stylishly designed body made out of matt plastic along with silver lining and orange highlights. Thanks to those, the orange Walkman theme has been kept all over the handset, while keeping successfully away from the flamboyant styling of some of the previous Walkman phones.

Measuring at 106 x 54 x 15 mm, the W950 could be hardly called a compact phone, but as far as smartphones go, it is in fact pretty slim. The probable reason for that is the absence of a camera. When it comes to width though, our friend has lot more to show. But width is essential in order to be able to use comfortably the Jog Dial single-handedly. And you may agree, that is of great importance since besides the stylus, it is the only way to navigate through the interface.

Similar to Sony Ericsson P990, the Jog Dial can no longer be used in five directions as in Sony Ericsson P910. Now the only available directions are scroll up, scroll down and press. We think that the 5-way Jog Dial was a great navigation tool and stripping it of two of its functions would most surely disappoint many people that are already used to it.

Now, beside the Jog Dial, the left side of the body features only a Back button used for exiting the current menu. The left side is also the one from where you can pull out the stylus, which plugs in into a special slot in the phone’s body.

W950 left side: Jog Dial, Back button and stylus visible

The right side of the phone features only a dual volume key and a dedicated stop/play key for the music player.

W950 right side: volume and stop/play buttons visible

The upper part of the body incorporates the on/off key and the Infrared port while the bottom end features the Fast Port used for charging and for plugging in the headset.

W950 top and bottom part: Infrared port and Fast port visible

The back part of the handset is rather bare in fact. The only visible elements are the loudspeaker grill in orange, the Sony Ericsson logo and the cap on the external antenna jack.

W950 back view

Removing the back cover reveals the standard Sony Ericsson BST-33 Lithium-Polymer battery with a capacity of 900 mAh. According to the manufacturer, it should last up to 2.5 hours of talk time in UMTS networks and up to 7.5 hours in regular GSM networks. The expected standby time varies from up to 250 hours in UMTS networks to up to 340 hours in GSM ones. The battery should also be enough for up to 10 hours of listening to music. Unfortunately, we couldn’t test the phone’s battery life since we used the phone heavily during our tests and thus the battery life we experienced was not indicative for the real-life performance of the handset.

The SIM card slot is in the upper part. You simply plug it in and when you have to take it out, you should pull out the metal tray protruding from the slot.

Battery cover removed

Now the front panel would probably arouse much more interest. Most of it is taken by the 2.6” touchscreen display. Above it is the in-call speaker grill again with an orange highlight. Below the display, there is the Walkman logo and the keypad.

W950 front

The keypad itself is rather innovative both in technology and in design; at least as much as the mobile phones’ world is concerned. The keys are level but have a good reaction to pressing – in general, the feedback is sure and positive. Each key has a small protruding dot that would help you work with the keypad without looking at it.

An interesting solution in W950 is that there are no conventional navigation keys. Navigating trough the menu options is carried out either with the help of the stylus or with the side Jog-Dial and Back button. The keypad also lacks the standard keys for receiving or ending calls – for that purpose you would again have to use either the Jog Dial or the touchscreen. A nice thing about the touchscreen is that you can use it for the basic functions without taking out the stylus – a simple press with your thumb would do since the most important on-screen keys are made large enough.

Beside the regular alphanumeric keys, there is also a dedicated Music player key on the left marked with the Walkman logo and a correction C on the right. The alphanumeric keys have a white backlighting while the Walkman key and the C key have an orange one.

When you turn on the Music player a new row of keys lights up – those are the three dedicated multimedia keys REW, STOP/PLAY, and FFW.

W950 keypad: multimedia keys visible in the dark

The keypad is ok when typing slowly and you take your time to make sure that you press each key strong enough, but when it comes to writing regular messages at regular speed it can easily turn your life into hell. The innovative design of the keys in fact provides for their highly inconvenient use. You are almost sure to make writing mistakes all the time unless you take your time and write very carefully.

The smartphone, however, is really comfortable for everyday use and feels great when held in hand. The added millimeters in width in fact provide for a very good grip and the weight of 112 g feels just fine. Besides the nagging writing problem, we might say that it’s one of the most comfortable smartphones to use and carry with you.

W950 held in hand

The touchscreen display of Sony Ericsson W950 is pretty large with a diagonal of 2.6”. It supports 262K colors and works in QVGA (240 x 320 pixels) resolution. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do so well under direct sun light.

W950 display • the phone in the dark

As anyone could expect, W950 offers nice signal reception strength and we found no problems during calls. The vibration is on a medium level, while the ringing volume is more than enough to alert you of incoming calls even in a noisy street.

Dialing a number • Calling Dexter

Great interface

The phone’s interface is UIQ 3.0, which is a customizable stylus-based user interface for media-rich mobile phones that is based on the Symbian OS 9.1 OS. Besides regular clock, date, signal strength and battery meter, the standby mode offers the user a Today screen and a customizable shortcuts bar. The Today screen shows current Calendar events, message and email inbox, missed calls, general notes, etc. It is directly accessible by pressing the Jog-Dial. By default the shortcuts bar allows access to the Calendar, the phonebook, the web browser, the message inbox and the main menu. The shortcut items can be selected with the stylus as well as with your finger since the graphic icons are large enough for the purpose.

Standby mode with Today screen expanded and collapsed

In standby, there are also two pop-up menus. The first one can be invoked by the More softkey and the second one can be opened by pressing with the stylus the triangle in the upper left corner. The first one offers the option to turn on a connectivity feature, change the volume, view the smartphone’s status, and allows access to a call management option for filtering incoming calls. The other one gives you access to the most important items or actions you may need or like to do – for example, turn on connectivity options such as Bluetooth or Infrared, make a new call, add a new contact or put down some appointments and notes. Furthermore, it gives you access to the dual time zone clock and allows you to control the volume level for different events centrally. We are very pleased with this menu since it allows quick access to the most important functions of any smartphone.

Pop-up menus • Time zone manager with alarms

A nice thing is that the smartphone has a dedicated Flight mode, which can be turned on seamlessly without even restarting the phone. Even if you have to turn it off for some reason, there is an option that the phone asks you whether you want to start it directly into Flight mode.

The main menu of the Sony Ericsson W950 allows you two different views such as icons grid or list view.

Main menu

The smartphone interface can be customized through various graphic themes. We find the default orange Walkman theme very pleasing to the eye but still there are other graphic themes that may freshen up the things for you when you get fed up with it. Several of them come preinstalled while many more should be available online once the phone becomes publicly available.

Some of the preinstalled graphic themes

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

And finally Walkman…

The music player is the same as the one used in the Walkman-branded Sony Ericsson phones. Well, not quite. In fact, Sony Ericsson W950 boasts one of the most developed music players we have seen in a mobile phone. Of course, it supports playlists with shuffle and loop options while offering the usual equalizer presets including the Walkman MegaBass one. The dedicated music player key on the keypad along with the multimedia keys, that come alive once you have started the player, really make the life easier for the user – not that we would expect any less than that when we are talking about a Walkman-branded mobile.

Playing a song • Loading an album • Equalizer presets • Filtering tracks by Artist

Nice innovations are the several animated background visualizations, which are a very nice touch, by the way. An added way to sort all your music is by using the added rating and mood designations. First, you can add ratings to the songs and then filter the available tracks by their rating. The mood designation, on the other hand, means that after adding a corresponding mood to your tracks you can later on filter the songs and virtually listen only to those that suit your current mood.

Available visualizations • Adding mood or rating • Available moods • Filtering tracks by mood

The player also offers a sleep timer allowing it to turn off automatically after a user-defined period. One of the coolest things about the player is that you can scroll through your tracks a lot easier using the side Jog Dial.

The external speaker as well as the stereo headset provides a nice listening experience – nothing less than one would expect from a Walkman phone. The speaker manages to sound very mild and pleasant although lacking substantial bass element. The headphones don’t have that problem at all and sounded more than satisfying.

The Video Player application offers basic functionality. A nice feature is that you can watch your videos in landscape mode at fullscreen view. According to the manufacturer, the Sony Ericsson W950 is able to play smoothly videos with VGA resolution, captured at 30 fps, which is more than enough to watch a music video or even a movie. Besides the usual mobile formats such as 3GPP, the smartphone supports MP3, AAC+, MPEG-4 and Real Audio 9 and RealMedia formats.

Video Player

The stereo FM radio that the W950 is equipped with supports RDS and can store up to 20 radio stations. If the radio station has RDS broadcasts, it gets stored in the phone’s memory with its name. The equalizer presets as well as the sleep function and the visualizations that are available for the Music player are available for the FM radio, too. This again makes it one of the most developed FM radio applications we have seen in a mobile.

Tuning in a station • Browsing stations with the Jog Dial • FM radio options • RDS options

Connectivity means much

When it comes to connecting the W950 smartphone to a computer or other devices, you have various options. You can use the integrated Infrared port, a USB cable or the Bluetooth 2.0 functionality. Connecting the smartphone to a PC via the Bluetooth worked like a charm. The Bluetooth capabilities of the device include also support for the A2DP profile, which allows you to use a stereo Bluetooth headset for listening to music.

Synchronization with the PC or remote server via SyncML also works seamlessly. The user can choose items to be synchronized.

Remote sync options

Besides Infrared and Bluetooth, the W950 has tri-band GSM/UMTS support (GSM 900/1800/1900) and supports GPRS for fast data transfers in non-3G enabled networks. EDGE (the so-called E-GPRS) support lacks here.

The Sony Ericsson W950 comes equipped with the famous Opera 8.0 web browser, which has made a reputation as one of the best for mobile devices. It supports HTML, XHTML, JavaScript, frames, CSS, and TSL and SSL security protocols.

Opera web browser

Users can quickly and easily switch between portrait and landscape modes as well as change from a normal view with scroll bars to a full screen view. Furthermore, you can use the Text mode option to reformat pages to exclude pictures and thus save some of those precious megabytes you pay your network carrier for. We are pretty happy with the browser capabilities but it must be noted that the Web browser that comes with the Nokia Symbian smartphones with the S60 3rd edition user interface outperforms it with an ease.

Web browser in landscape fullscreen mode

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.

Sony Ericsson W950 pictures

Sony Ericsson W950 screenshots

Source: http://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_w950-review-111p6.php

Sony Ericsson W950i

Introduction

And now it’s time for UIQ to play with the big boys. Because, while the P800 might have been their first effort, which was improved on through the rest of the P series right up to the P990, while the M600 had the slim form factor and messaging capability that would attract that certain purchaser in the IT department, the W950i is the first UIQ smartphone to be clearly and defiantly aimed at the consumer market. When the man on the street goes out to but a phone that plays music, like that iPod thing(!), they’re going to be steered to this.

Of course, that’s the Symbian fan’s view – there’s another massive collision in the W950i. Sony Ericsson have been pushing music phones (through the Walkman brand) for a number of years as well, so this is the culmination of a long product upgrade cycle. There are going to be more people looking at this and going “wow, they’ve upgraded the internal storage to 4GB and added a bundle of applications for model number six” and not give two hoots about the Operating System and politics behind it.

What they are going to see is one of the slimmest Walkman phones ever sold (a mere 15mm); it’s got more fashion seeping out of the mystic purple casing that Kate Moss; it’s featherweight light; has a flat-touch keypad, and it just reeks of style. Put simply, I have not seen a more gorgeous phone on any Symbian device in a long time. Make no mistake, this device is going to have increased sales simply because of how it looks on the store shelf.

I really like this phone, but it’s not perfect. Some of the design choices (such as the lack of camera or Wi-Fi) leave a power user such as myself a bit lost, but there are rational reasons why they have been made. On the other hand some of the choices made are just plain stupid, and detract from a very well focused smartphone, as I shall explain.

Hardware Controls

The number pad has grown on me. It’s not completely flat; there are some raised bumps (almost like Braille marks) for each key so you can locate the keys without looking (something a perfectly flat keypad could never manage). Given that this bump is in the centre of the key, while the number is on the left of the ‘strike area’ (and letters on the right) it makes more sense to type blind than watching your fingers, as you tend to focus on the numbers and miss hitting the centre. Great for a few words or phone numbers, but for any reasonable amount of input you will be using the touch screen’s Jot character recognition, or relying on your Contacts database for email addresses. It really doesn’t improve with use.

As well as the standard keys on the number pad, the front of the machine also sports a dedicated ‘Walkman’ button which will bring up the music player application no matter what application you are in, and a ‘C’ (for clear) button on the other side. When you are in the Walkman application, above the number pad lights up a triumvirate of “rewind, play/pause and fast forward” icons. This brings up the first gotcha of the W950. These aren’t dedicated keys – they are simply using the adjacent 1, 2 and 3 number keys, and only in the Walkman application.

And that means when you are not in Walkman application, the only music control open to you is the pause button on the right hand side of the W950. Compare this to the dedicated playback controls on the N91 and it feels like something was missed in the design stage (note that you do have a remote control on the headphone cord, but more on that later). Under the pause button, you have a rocker control for the volume – and this is so infuriating for two reasons. The first is that it doesn’t directly control the volume! You tap either up or down, wait half a second or so for a volume dialog to come up on screen, and then you have to press the key again to change the volume. First of all, I’ve pressed down, just turn it down – and if you are going to insist on showing me the dialog, at least have the courtesy of remembering which key I pressed and act on it, don’t make me press it twice when I’m struggling to turn down an MP3 that is unexpectedly loud.

Oh and the other problem with the volume rocker? It’s directly opposite the thumb wheel. When you press the thumbwheel in to confirm a dialog, the natural hand motion is to squeeze on the opposite side of the device – which is exactly where the volume control is. Okay, after a week or so you remember not to squeeze, but it’s really annoying.

Yes, we only have a scroll wheel. Where the Pxxx devices had a five way rocker (roll up, roll down, forward, backward and in), the W950 has a simple ‘scroll up, scroll down and in’ thumb wheel, which is actually a lot easier for a new user to understand. To aid navigation, just below the thumbwheel is a ‘back’ button (which is also duplicated on screen in pretty much every single application), which is actually a very simple device, but incredibly useful – it steps you back through an application, to the launch screen, and then back to the home/today screen through multiple presses. A long press and hold will jump you straight back to the home screen (or activate the key lock if you are on the home screen). Finally, something that’s intuitive, simple to understand, that just works! Praise be!

Once you add on the UIQ3 interface (of which I’ll dissect in part two of this review), I do wonder if anyone in Sony Ericsson actually sat down to do any real world user interface testing, or whether they simply took some elements from previous UIQ phones, some elements from previous Walkman phones, and threw them all together hoping that they would work. For all of the smooth styling and looks, it drives like a Sherman tank. Firmware updates (which can be done over the Internet by the end user) need to address the issues they can as a matter of priority. There is just too much delay, fudging and guesswork in too many controls.

I look at the Apple announcement of the iPhone, where the interface was given priority – and using the W950 it’s not hard to see why they’ll use this as a primary marketing message.

The Walkman Player

And so onto the Walkman features. It’s hard to miss, with the name engraved on the side, three Walkman logos on the casing, and a short-cut to the application both on the casing and on the top line of the standby screen. So there’s no problem getting to it.

It’s when you get to it that it starts to be a bit confusing and a touch frustrating…

Finding the Music

When you press the Walkman button on screen or on the hardware, you’re taken to a display of the current (or last played) track. There are no onscreen playback controls (remember that 1, 2, and 3 now act as the controls), but you do have a progress bar for the individual track, which you can reposition using the stylus (tucked away at the back of the machine) to drag the desired position. Album Art (if available) is on display, and playback options such as shuffle, continuous play and graphic equaliser are alongside. Apart from the progress bar, all these on-screen buttons are just too fiddly to use without the stylus – your thumb is not going to be able to manage. For a portable device, to require the stylus to be removed, delicately tapping the screen, and then replaced, seems at odds with the nature of a smartphone (for example, used when out jogging).

Flanking the bottom of the screen are two ‘ranking’ systems. On the left is a ‘star’ rating from 0 to 5, and on the right is the ‘mood’ of the track, a colour coded, easy to access form of playlist. You can mark up tracks as ‘Happy,’ ‘Sad,’ ‘Energetic’ or ‘Chilled’ (although you can relabel these yourself – it’s just too delightful to assign yellow as ‘Cheesey’!). Under the moods choice under “My Music” you’ll be able to select a mood of music. Both of these are great ideas, but in practice they are pretty much eye candy.

I’ve already rated most of my music in iTunes. Why can’t it read those ratings? Or the ratings in Windows Media Player? There’s no direct equivalent of ‘moods’ in any of my desktop PC applications, so isn’t adding this information a waste of time? Personally I find these ratings as a wasted effort. I’ve a playlist called favourites that I can manage on my PC that is then drag and dropped over to the phone. All I need to do is just grab the last tunes added and put them in my ‘favourites’ playlist created on the W950.

Oh, there’s no way to list the last tracks added, or sort them by date… (aaaahhrgh!!! Fx: pulls hair out). Given that this device is something where music will chop and change, this should be an automatic playlist option. The W950 already has a number of Auto Play lists, namely Top Rated (see comments on ranking tracks on the device), Most Played, Least Played, Last Played and Bookmarks. How hard would it be to add in a “Last Added” auto playlist?

Beyond this though, navigating your album list is a good one handed experience, apart from one gotcha. Remember that calling up the Walkman app takes you to the current track? Well, hitting the back key takes you to the home screen. All well and good, but to get to the playlists, album and track listings, you need to press the “My Music” on screen button. There’s no hardware button control, so time to use your thumb (yes you can get away with your thumb along the bottom icons). It would make more sense to me to have the back key jump up to the main Walkman navigation before returning to the home screen.

Once you get there though, it’s the thumbwheel‘s call to action, as you scroll through a top level of play lists, albums, tracks or artists. You then get an alphabetical list of the contents, and can drill down again (and again if needed) to return to the ‘play this song’ screen. If scrolling not your thing (and once I reached about 150 tracks over 20 albums it was no longer my thing) you’ll be relying on the search feature. Which is a bit useless.

When I have to search through these lists (for example, under the ‘all tracks’ option), I expect all the text to be searched. If the search string is ‘Love’ then I would hope that the search would pick up the following songs…

• Love Me Do
• All You Need Is Love
• Smell the Glove

…in other words, wherever the string ‘love’ appears in a song title, it would be presented to me. The W950 unfortunately doesn’t do this. It will only search each song title starting at the first letter. So you only see “Love me Do.” Now while this makes for a much faster search, it makes it a lot harder to find tracks, especially if your MP3 file’s ID3 tags are not perfect. Again, it seems that real world testing has been skipped – at the very least this could be a preference (search optimised for either speed or accuracy) for the user to decide.

All in all, the finer details of the Walkman application leave me feeling that the code can be improved significantly in future firmware updates.

Transferring the Music

I’ve covered this in depth in one of my first W950 articles, but in brief, the bundled PC application to transfer MP3s (Disc2Phone) is one of the best transfer solutions I’ve come across in a long time. It’s simple to use, tightly focussed on what it needs to do, and a lot of thought has been put into how a new user will use it. The smartphone UI designers could learn thing or two from it.

If having more control over your uploads is for you, then the W950 can switch its connection option to be a simple USB Mass Storage Device, where you can drag and drop your files into the internal 4GB flash memory (unfortunately the W950 does not come with space for an external memory card). Just like the N91, you’re asked to refresh your list of music files when you detach the USB cable. It’s just as annoying here as it was on the N91.

Listening to the Music

Early this week I ran a blind audio test with the W950, measuring it against the aforementioned N91 and the iPod Shuffle, and the general conclusion of the editorial team at All About Symbian was that the devices are no longer the limiting factor to the listener. The noise of the environment you are in, the quality of your headphones, and the compression and artefacts in the MP3 (or AAC or WMA) files will all have a bigger effect than the audio signal the W950 produces.

One of the things that upset me is the complete lack of gapless playback in the modern MP3 playback. Gapless playback means that when one music file finishes, the second plays immediately… with no gaps. While this might seem a small thing if you listen to your regular three minute slice of processed pop, if you’re listening to a live concert recording… or a suite of classical music… or even Chronicles of the Black Sword by Hawkwind [yay – Ed], these little stutters of a few seconds of silence can get annoyng very quickly.

I don’t think there is any excuse for this. The application knows what song is up next – it can look at the playlist, or the next track in the album, and get it ready. Hundreds of thousands of computer operations can happen each second, there must be a solution to this. Sony can manage it on their minidisk system, and that’s a physical spinning medium along the lines of a CD – with Flash storage there’s not even that excuse.

The W950 does not come with a standard 3.5mm headphone socket, so you must use the attached break out box. This plugs into the base of the machine, adding about half an inch to the length, and the cable itself is about three feet long. Two feet along the cable is the one piece of kit that redeems the interface of the W950 – the remote control. With a central play/pause button, and a ring control around the outside for both volume, skip forward and backwards, and scan forwards and backwards, it provides almost instantaneous control of your music, with no delays for dialogs to pop up on the screen, no need to search through dialog boxes, or hunt for the controls in your pocket (although if this controller can manage it, that means there’s no reason the rest of the device can’t react as fast).

I just wish it was further up the cable. Being only two feet away from the pocket the device is awkward. Add another foot to get to the 3.5mm port to add your own headphones (which add their own cable length to the mix) means that you’ll be wrestling a bit of a python with all the cables (see below). Luckily there is a stereo Bluetooth headset profile if you‘ve got the right equipment.

Summing Up The Walkman

What’s most annoying to me is that the W950 is so close to being a really excellent music player. It talks to a desktop computer with ease (and using USB Mass Storage means pretty much anything can talk to it in some form). The audio quality is very good, especially with the right encoding and headphones. Most importantly I can have my Atomic Rooster albums at full volume and not worry about missing a call because the W950 will break into the music and let me know.

It’s just the small things that niggle me and damage the user experience so that the application stops being something hiding in the background that just works, and becomes something that needs you to make a conscious effort to think about what you want to accomplish. Luckily most of the problems are in software, so it should be something Sony Ericsson can address.

Source : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/Sony_Ericsson_W950i_part_1.php