At A Glance:

In the box
- Sony Ericsson W705 (Prototype)
- Sony Ericsson headphone
- Sony Ericsson dedicated speaker
- USB cable
- Stereo handsfree (with clear sound)
- Application CD
- 4GB M2 memory card
- Battery charger

Sony Ericsson’s W705 is touted as the most advanced Walkman phone from SE- at first glance this phone has an abundance of features, and is packaged within a slim design. Let’s just take a look if that truly fits the bill.

This handset has yet to hit the markets yet, but we got an early sneak peek at this Walkman phone. So note that the specifications and details might change for the final release version.

Design
The Sony Ericsson W705 has a slim slider design and our review unit is in ‘passionate red’. The slider has a clean design, and has a nice little tactile bounce when it is pushed open. Aside from looking attractive, the slider feels resilient yet easy to operate.

The Sony Ericsson W705 comes with a 2.4-inch TFT screen with 256K colours. The screen’s pretty decent and looks crisp and clear. But we had a little trouble with sunlight legibility.

As usual the sunken keypads aren’t our first choice, especially for a phone this slim, making the keys all bunch together. It’s a little easy to mistype our messages or when gaming (manoeuvring into a gaping maw). The external keys are better, despite the size and we love that Sony Ericsson task manager key, which accesses the phone main functions and manages it applications.

The phone’s right spine has a volume rocker, meanwhile the left has the universal port for charging, headphones and other SE accessories. The top part of the phone has the Walkman motion shake button, when the button is pressed and the phone is shaken, you can move forward or backward in your tracklist.

We would have preferred an external 3.5 mm headphone as opposed to the SE port, the dedicated headphone makes listening to your music and charging the phone at the same time a moot point.

Features
The phone uses SE’s proprietary UIQ OS, with some pretty attractive looking themes. It does slow down somewhat when we went for the fancy themes and hopefully the updated software will resolve that.

SE users should feel quite at home with the OS, and newcomers should have no problems at all. The menus are again aligned at 3x4 grids, with main icons leading into sub-menus. The phone has an accelerometer allowing full auto-rotation, which extends to all features on the phone.

The task manager button on the external keypad brings up tasks you previously minimized, and allows you to scroll through tabs where we can quick launch favourite programmes.

The phone has 120MB worth of internal memory with support up to 4GB for the M2 memory card (4GB memory card included). This might be adequate for most of your EP’ s but don’t expect to fit too many albums in here.

Speaking of music, SE threw in a speaker to share your music with friends or unwitting strangers. The speaker can be attached to the universal port and has decent sound quality, the sound does blare when turning up the volume. With the YouTube portal throw-in, you have a multimedia device on your hands.

As usual, you can set up playlist through Sony Ericsson’s music player-sorting, adding and creating new playlist are all a breeze to do. Audio quality is good, and at maximum volume our songs came out pretty clear. Audio quality is much better on the Sony Ericsson headphones, and has a good audio output.

Other features include Desktop direct search for online music to post songs and videos on YouTube, Wi-Fi and GPS connectivity, preloaded Google Maps, FM radio TrackID to listen to your favourite music. The SensMe music playback also makes a return, should you need the phone to choose your mood music for you.

Camera
The Sony Ericsson W705 boasts a 3.2 megapixel camera with LED flash at 2048x1536 pixels resolution. No auto-focus though. The camera shoots standard quality picture, the flash comes in handy for improved quality.

The Sony Ericsson W705 also comes with a secondary camera for video calls and vanity shots.

Connectivity
The phone has a large amount of connectivity options - quad band (GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900), 3.6 Mbps HSDPA and Wi-Fi, which is a huge plus for a mid-end phone like this. However, there was a slight snag when we wandered out of a Wi-Fi zone, automatically kicked in GRPS connectivity which burned through our remaining pre-paid credit.

Games
Plenty of built-in games here, the most interactive of these is Bowling, which involves actual ‘bowling’ to throw the bowl down the lane, then using the accelerometer to guide the ball. It’s an interesting concept, and we certainly enjoyed ourselves.

Our verdict
The Sony Ericsson W705 continues Sony Ericsson’s line of music-centric devices, while the device is jam packed with features for a mid-range price. The keypad will need some patience and the camera could be a worked on a little. More importantly, the core of the W705 is a music phone and it does that well. The W705 is recommendable to just about anyone at RM 1,499, with a tested design, Wi-Fi and interactivity as its strongest points.