By Joseph Hanlon, CNET.com.au on 23 January 2008 06:07 PM
Tags: w960i, sony ericsson, music, mobile phone, mp3, bluetooth, wi-fi, 3g
Manufacturer: Sony Ericsson
The reviewers slammed this phone for its Text mesage handling and input, in particular in regards to management of predicative text.
I find this inaccurate, and I live with this phone.
The phone not only has predicative text, but having spent some time understanding the interplay between the touch-screen, keys, and jog-wheel, I can bang out a text faster than any phone I've ever used or seen. So ding them on the intuitiveness of the interface, fair; but spend a bit of time with it and the instructions and it will satisfy. (HINT: use the jog-wheel to select chosen word; once done touch anywhere in the remaining text and the desired word is input. Genius.)
In day to day use, the lags are there but haven't made me lose the will to live or given me the desire to hurl the phone into oncoming traffic.
Reasonably pleased overall.
The good: Good phone. Good text. Decent Camera and Video capability. Mp3 player is a joy and intuitive. Lots of memory. Reasonably attractive. Well-lit. Adequate Handsfree. Sturdy. Reasonably good in-use battery-life.
The bad: Something the authors didn't mention was Byzantine connectivity method interfaces mean it is not obvious to configure for WIFI etc. Speaker and onboard handsfree mic could have been better.
As ,view,press optionspreviously mentioned about not being able to save numbers from SMS,open the message,view,go to options,open use highlight object,add contact
The W960i is bursting at the seams with features; so much so that it struggles to keep up with the processing and is let down by its laggy interface.
RRP: AU$1099.00
w960i, sony ericsson, music, mobile phone, mp3, bluetooth, wi-fi, 3g, 3-megapixel
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I agree with the summary of the editors review of the W960i. It is a potentially great phone seriously compromised by a slow, clunky and inefficient user interface. There is an inconsistant approach to input too. In use you find you are constantly juggling between jog wheel, touch screen and key pad. It's very fiddly and makes one handed use impossible.
Text mesage handling and input has indeed got to be the worst I've ever experienced on a mobile phone, when most other manufacturers have got it down to a fine art of simplicity SE have made a mess of it here.
This above is entierly a software issue so should Sony Erisson have the desire to correct it, they could. Unfortunately Sony Ericsson don't have a particularly good track record in this respect.
The Walkman sound quality is nothing particularly special either. I compared it to my cheap supermarket mp3 player and the Walkman's sound noticabley lacks vibrant dynamic punchiness in comparison, it's quite flat, not what I was expecting at all.
To me the W960i also seems to have a large amount of poor preinstalled software. The UIQ build of the otherwise superb Opera 8.65 mobile browser is horrificly bad in comparison to the S60 and Windows Mobile versions. Quick office fails to open my simple spreadsheet files. You spend more time checking for and correcting the mistakes business card scanner makes than it would for you to have directly entered the details into contacts. The icing on the cake to me is Online Media, a facilty to view streaming video from the internet. Now most of us know that YouTube and the vast majority of other online video sites use the FLV (Flash Video) format. The W960i does not support FLV video. Doh! A near redundant feature right from the start. This just typifies the W960i and the lack of thought applied to it by Sony Ericsson.
The good: Looks, good sized screen, good sized positive action keypad, slim for it's spec, reasonable camera
The bad: Dreadful user interface, no D-pad, disappointing Walkman, functionally restricted UIQ versions of preinstalled software