Video Review of Sony Ericsson W960i Walkman phone
Sony Ericsson announced the Sony Ericsson W960i Walkman phone last week, and as promised, here's a longer video of it.
The W960i is set to be Sony Ericsson's flagship music phone, and as such is destined to go head to head with the iPhone, which is due for release in the US on June 29th.
As such, it's got some meaty competition ahead of it.
To give it a sporting chance against the iPhone, Sony Ericsson have given the W960i a touchscreen interface, which, as you can see from the video, seems to work well, but in a functional way, rather than an intuitive and extremely attractive way like the iPhone.
You can see the full video of the Sony Ericsson W960i after the jump.
Overall first impressions of the W960i are that it's the best Walkman phone yet, and its interface is certainly the best Sony Ericsson have come up with for its music phones to date.
However, it's clearly no iPhone.
The multi-touch functionality of the iPhone, which lets you use two fingers to control the elements on the screen rather than just one, combined with the rich visuals, makes its interface light years ahead of phones such as the W960i.
However, in the W960i's defence, it does come with 8GB of memory, plus a 3.2 megapixel camera, which should be much better than the iPhone's 2 megapixel version.
It seems, though, that the iPhone has, if nothing else, raised the bar in terms of the features that mobile phone manufacturers are now having to include in their new handsets. It would be interesting to see what the W960i would have looked like had the iPhone not arrived.
My guess is that the touchscreen would either not be there, or be much less intuitive, while the new interface would have only been an incremental improvement over the current top of the range Walkman phone, the W950i.
As such, the iPhone should be lauded for making Sony Ericsson produce the best Walkman phone they've ever produced, and also encouraging them to focus more on the user interface, something that's been sorely lacking in previous generations of mobile phones. Whether this will be enough to encourage people to buy the Sony Ericsson W960i over the iPhone remains to be seen.
Read more on the Sony Ericsson W960i >>
[Source: SymbianFrance]
