Sony Ericsson W760i / W760  

By Michell Bak, 26th of July 2008.
Sony Ericsson’s latest high-end Walkman offering is much more than just another Walkman phone. It is the first Walkman phone to combine an array of features, including built-in GPS, HSDPA network connections, Walkman 3 player, latest Bluetooth standards, and a very impressive user interface. Add to that, an interesting slider design and a nice collection of bundled accessories, and you’ve got the Sony Ericsson W760. It is not perfect, but we’re sure getting there.

Official product pictures of the Sony Ericsson W760

Advantages

• Quad-band GSM / EDGE / Tri-band UMTS / HSDPA
• Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR
• Interesting design
• 1 GB memory card included
• Built-in GPS unit for navigation and training
• Speedy and impressive user interface
• Lots of pre-installed applications and games
• Large and bright display
• Decent sound quality
• Good call quality and network reception strength
• Bundled accessories

Disadvantages

• Build quality issues
• Mediocre camera, lacking auto focus
• Mediocre speakers
• No WLAN
• Only 3 months of WayFinder subscription
• Could be a bit cheaper

The one phone in Sony Ericsson’s portfolio most similar to the W760 is the W910 - another thin slider Walkman phone, featuring a large display, same user interface, HSDPA network support, Bluetooth, and much more. W910 is considerably thinner and lighter than W760, although W760 arguably looks better. The phones are generally equally well built.

I’ll be quite honest with you from the start; I am unaware whether or not my review unit is a special edition box or not, as it differs from what the press release states as being in the consumer box. Either way, I’ll be focusing on the box I received. The rather large, yellow-coloured box contains a set of standard accessories apart from the phone itself - a charger, a USB cable for file transfers and synchronization, a software CD disc, and a lot of papers to read, if you’re into that kind of stuff. Now, that was the usual standard stuff. It also comes with a wired stereo headset (HPM-64), the MMC-70, which is a 3.5 mm jack cable, as well as the MAS-100 Active Speaker, which is a wired speaker solution with a built-in FM antenna. I really fancy the addition of the MAS-100 in the sales package, but I cannot understand why Sony Ericsson chose to include the HPM-64 rather than one of the newer and better headsets for this higher end Walkman phone.

“She’s got the look”

Apologies on the somewhat 80’s-inspired title, nonetheless that’s what came to mind when thinking about the W760’s looks. The stylish, rounded slider sports a 2.2 inch display on its very front. The display is capable of displaying up to 262.144 different colours. The resolution of the display is 240 x 320 pixels, technically also known as QVGA. The display is rather impressive, and has to be among Sony Ericsson’s best displays. Colours are well-saturated, the brightness of the display is more than sufficient, and its legibility in sunlight is definitely approved as well.

The alphanumeric keypad is quite nice to use. The tactile feedback is good, and the keys are nicely sized. I would, however, have liked the keys to be better separated. Another thing I didn’t fancy very much about the keypad is the fact that the especially the top row of keys is harder to use than the rest of the keys. The slider is simply in the way of your thumb.
The soft keys are working far better than I had expected, and my personal experiences tell me that the keys are of an appropriate size as well. By looking at the photos, you’ll notice the areas around the call keys look a bit like speakers; this is actually where the stereo speakers are located.

The official dimensions for W760 are 103 x 48 x 15 (18) millimetres. The size is acceptable, and it should fit in most pockets. W760 tips the scales at 103 grams, so it’s a bit heavier than the W910, which is a similar music-focused Walkman product. The W760 feels rather nice in your hand, and - with the exception of the battery cover - is a really well built phone. The slider mechanism, however, is by no means as good as the one in W910. It’s too tight, and a bit hard to use.
W760 is available in three colour trimmings; Fancy Red, Intense Black, and Rocky Silver. My personal favourite has to be the Fancy Red variant, but the other two are definitely not bad looking either.

When closed, the back of the phone - with the exception of the glowing Walkman logo - looks a bit dull and anonymous, and the light bump near the end doesn’t look that great either. It isn’t until you slide the phone open, you’ll realize that it actually does have a bit of personality. When opening the phone, the camera on the back gets revealed, along with an extremely glossy golden surface (on the Intense Black variant). It looks fabulous!

The left side of W760 holds the FastPort connector, used for charging, transferring data and listening to music, a shortcut key to the Walkman player, as well as the lanyard eyelet near the very bottom of the phone.
The right side looks rather clean to the eye, even though this is where the volume controls are placed.

The bottom of the phone is home of the microphone, while the top plays host to the memory card slot (Memory Stick Micro only).

The battery cover is fairly easy to remove, and again rather easy to put back in place. The battery is a standard BST-38 (Li-Polymer) with 930 mAh of play time.
The battery is supposedly good for up to 400 hours of standby, or 9 hours of talk on GSM networks, or 4 hours of talk on 3G networks. It is not possible to do video calls on W760. Official statements might be one thing, but real-life experiences are apparently another thing. I don’t recall the W760 staying up and running for more than three days of normal use before it needed to be charged - a bit of a pity.

User interface

The most important factor when deciding whether or not a user interface is good is how easy it is to use and how speedy it is. The A2 software platform used in Sony Ericsson’s mid/high-end feature phones has been significantly updated with newer phones, such as the C702, C902 and W760. The first and early software revisions of this platform had been bashed for not being all that responsive, and generally quite unstable. I can without doubt now say that most problems have been dealt with. I did notice one bug, though, where the menu suddenly shrunk to 75% of its size. It was fixed by entering the main menu once again. Quite a peculiar bug, though.

Another thing people have been aching about is the fact that playing music in the background while performing another action, such as writing a text-message, slows down the phone. I’ve tried this out several times, and didn’t encounter any noticeable slow-downs.

The interface is visually impressive, and portrait whatever you may desire. The W760 comes with five preloaded themes, and although there should be one for every taste, you can download thousands of free themes for the phone, or even create extensive themes yourself.

It is possible to set the menu layout yourself by choosing from a list of layouts. The menu icons can be displayed in the traditional grid mode, a rotating layout, a single icon list layout, or in the layout specified in the current set theme, if any - Flash Lite menus, that is.

One of the prime features of Sony Ericsson’s feature phones is the activity menu. It is unfortunately also one of the features most people tend to forgot about. The activity menu is basically a pop-menu that allows you to see recent events, such as phone calls, messages, and calendar events, browse and manage open applications, have access to a bunch of user-defined shortcuts as well as your very own links collection.

I’ve commented on the new soft key layout in previous reviews, so I won’t go into much detail about it. It works just fine, and previous owners of older phones won’t have much of a hassle settling with the new layout. After some time, I quickly found it better and faster in general use.

Applications and GPS

The W760 has to be the Sony Ericsson phone with the most pre-installed applications! W760 comes with no less than seven pre-installed applications; AccuWeather (a weather application), Converter (an application for converting distances, volumes, weights, temperatures, speeds, areas, and the newly updated version even includes a tip calculator for when you’re out dining), Music Mate 5 (a comprehensive music composer application with support for the built-in motion sensor), Rock Bobblehead (a rather entertaining Elvis-doll application that reacts according to your movements, and makes Elvis rock and roll!), Standby World (a clock application that displays three customizable clocks, and can be used as an application wallpaper), Wayfinder Navigator 7 (the great GPS navigation application), and World Clock 3D (another clock application displayed in the shape of a 3D globe).

The file manager is just absolutely brilliant. It sorts the files by type, so your camera shots are in one folder, your pictures in one folder, music files in one folder, and so on. The file manager is also tabbed so you can switch between the read source (all, memory card, and phone memory) the displayed content. It works really well. The file manager is capable of performing most standard tasks, such as copying files, marking several files, renaming, moving, create folders, and so on. You can also send files directly from the file manager, or make use of the links to edit the content (pictures and videos).

The built-in calendar is rather good, and definitely suits my needs and the majority of most people’s needs as well, I guess. The calendar has been slightly updated compared to the one in previous Sony Ericsson feature phones. As you’d expect, you can create rather detailed appointments and reminders, add notes to these, and perform a search. What more would you want a calendar to do?

W760 also supports content synchronization via either SyncML or Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync. Unfortunately, I do not use either myself, so I cannot tell you how it works, but it’s been reported working quite well.

It also features a code memo application that can keep all your secrets safely locked behind a 4-digit code. That may not sound very protective at all, but don’t forget that means there’ll be 10,000 lock combinations, and considering it’s a mobile phone, I’m quite sure no one would try to “hack” it by entering a rather long series of combinations.

The other various applications, or features if you’d like, include a nice set of alarms, tasks, notes, timer, and a stopwatch.

The Media application holds most of your media on the phone, including photos, music, videos, games and web feeds. We’ll leave you with a few screenshots for now, and talk about it later on in the camera and Walkman parts of the review.

One of W760’s most interesting features is the built-in GPS. It works with the Location services available in the phone’s menu. Google Maps is the first of the services you’ll encounter. It’s an impressive application for checking out just about anything you’d like. It can triangulate your global position, although it is far from as good as the GPS. The real deal comes in the shape of Wayfinder Navigator 7, which unfortunately cannot work offline. Although it is possible to download the maps from www.mywayfinder.com to a computer, and transfer them to the phone, you’ll still need an active Internet connection to make use of the application. I’ve tried it out for a short while, and it seems like a decent application for GPS navigation on your phone. The application is rather good looking, and I’m sure its functionality will be sufficient for most. W760 comes with a 3-month subscription to WayFinder Navigator, and although I would have liked it to be a bit longer, it should be enough to get you starting, and decide whether or not you’ll extend the license.

The W760 was announced and launched as a Walkman phone, but marketed as a fitness phone. This is because the built-in GPS can be used for something besides navigational purposes; training. The Tracker application will be your new best friend if you’re into running and such. It will track your routes, tell you about your current pace, time and distance, and it can also show you your progress, if you’ve set it to a special training session, such as a time or distance based one. The application can also show you your routes, and allows you to run them again, if you want to improve your results. While we’re at it, Tracker can also show your results for each day, and it’s capable of showing you an overall summary of all training sessions. In my opinion it’s a really nice application if you’re very active.

With regards to the GPS performance, I found the W760 rather good. The initial GPS fix took about 2-3 minutes, and shortly after that, it was connected to about seven satellites, which is really impressive! It’s fairly accurate, and is definitely usable in everyday situations.

Camera

Let’s face it - W760 is by no means a camera phone, nor is it marketed as being one. It does, however, pack an - at times - impressive camera, even though it lacks auto focus and a flash. W760 snaps pictures at a 3.2 mega pixel resolution (2048 x 1536 pixels). To use the camera, you must slide open the phone, as the camera is placed at the top part of the slider. Some will like this solution, as it offers good protection for the camera lens, while others won’t as it is a bit impractical.

The camera user interface has not changed much from other Sony Ericsson sliders without a camera key on the side. This basically means that you won’t get the better looking landscape interface, which is easier and faster to use, but instead you’re left with a portrait interface that is slower to use and looks outdated. Having said so, it is not among the worst camera interfaces on the market, and it’s considerably faster than most.

The following camera settings are available, of which most are available in video mode as well.

• View all pictures
• Shoot mode - Normal, Panorama, Frames, Burst
• Picture size - 3 MP, 2 MP, 1 MP, VGA
• Night mode - Off, On
• Self-timer - Off, On
• White balance - Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Fluorescent, Incandescent
• Effects - Off, Black & white, Negative, Sepia
• Picture quality - Fine, Normal
• Review - On, Off
• Add position - On, Off
• Save to - Mem. Card, Phone mem
• Shutter sound - Sound 1, Sound 2, Sound 3, Sound 4, Off
• Reset settings
• Reset counter

A few keypad shortcuts are also available for shoot mode, night mode and self-timer. You can zoom up to 3.2x (digitally) when in VGA mode, and it is possible to digitally alter the exposure in 0.3 intervals from -2.0 to +2.0.

Enough talk; let’s get to some camera samples.

Let’s start with the amount of details the W760 is capable of catching. Well, it’s not really that great. In great lighting conditions, you’ll end up with most details, but as soon as the lighting conditions are getting a tad bad, you’ll end up with a smear of details and noise.

The light management, though, is quite good, and W760 is generally quite good at ‘choosing’ appropriate shutter speeds. However, I don’t like the fact that the ISO speed is fixed at ISO 64. Sure, this is great if you’re looking for photos with little noise, but it makes the photos darker, meaning you’ll need a slower shutter speed, eventually meaning you’ll end up with blurry photos more often. This is, however, not something to worry about unless you’re taking pictures inside.

Colours are also really good. Red colours, which for some reason seems to be the one colour most cameras get wrong, are nice, and well-saturated. One note, though - it seems like W760 is sometimes struggling with green colours, but that might just be me.

Videos are recorded in MP4 format (H.263 codec) in QVGA resolution, 320 x 240 pixels. W760 records at a variable video bitrate at 400 - 550 Kbps, which is a rather high bitrate for this resolution. The framerate is at 15 frames per second, which is simply too low. You can see the quality for yourself below, if you’ve got QuickTime installed. If not, you can download the video files here and here, by right clicking and saving the files.

Your snaps and videos can be viewed in the Media application by either changing from camera/video mode to view mode in the menu, or by accessing the application from the menu. In here you can browse all the content, pass it on to friends and family, add tags, zoom in on photos, view photos on a map, if they’re geo-tagged, edit photos and videos, apply the PhotoFix corrections, or view your photos in a slideshow.

“Oh, it’s not a music phone?”

The W760 boasts the latest version of the Walkman player for feature phones, version 3. Version 3 adds support for 3-dimensional accelerometers, several added features, and makes room for an updated set of equalizer settings, although these are not available in W760 (yet?).

W760 supports decoding of a variety of audio codecs, including MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, RealAudio 8, and several WMA versions. Basically this means most people will be covered, although some codecs such as OGG cannot be played on this phone.

The Walkman player looks rather slick, and it’s quick and easy to navigate. You can set various settings, including equalizers, sound settings, play settings and visualization settings (album cover, animations, or nothing at all).

When the music is playing, the Walkman logo on the back of the phone will illuminate according to the beat of the song. If you’ve got a Flash-enabled theme set active, you’ll also notice that the wallpaper will display the song information, if a song is playing in the background. Both seem like gimmicks, but it’s cool nonetheless.

Talking of gimmicks, a few of Sony Ericsson’s latest Walkman phones feature the so-called Shake Control. You can do a few things with Shake Control, but it all starts with holding down the Walkman key on the phone. If you want to control the songs, you can tilt the phone to the right and left to go forward and back in your playlist. If you want to shuffle it, you simply shake the phone like a mad dog. There is also one more thing you can use Shake Control for - to control the volume. If you tilt the phone upwards while holding the Walkman key, it’ll increase the volume, and if you tilt it downwards, it’ll decrease the volume. That’s actually rather cool.

As a music player, W760 will be able to replace 99% of the stand-alone players available on the market. Its sound quality is good, although the bundled earphones does limit the quality, so if you’re looking to get a W760, you should definitely also buy a better set of earphones.

As said earlier on in the review, W760 comes bundled with three music accessories - the headset/earphones, a 3.5 mm jack cable and a speaker. I didn’t really put the jack cable to much use, but I did use the so-called Active Speaker quite a lot. To my surprise, it’s louder than the MPS-60/MPS-70, and the sound quality is also a tad better. The speaker also comes with a built-in FM antenna, so you can listen to the radio when connected.

While we’re on the topic of the FM radio, we might as well take a closer look at it. The radio can be used whenever a headset is connected, or any other accessory that is capable of acting as the antenna. The W760 can automatically store up to 20 FM radio frequencies. The frequencies are stored with whatever information is set available by the radio stations with the built-in RDS support. This means the phone can show the name of the radio station, the name of the song playing, and lots of other info texts, if supported by the stations. RDS will also automatically update the frequency if a better one is available.

Sony Ericsson’s special TrackID feature is also available when using the radio. The service records a small bit of the song playing, and uploads it to a server, and after a very short while the song information will be displayed in the web browser, if it was available in Gracenote’s huge database. It’s a really neat free service, although it will most likely cost you a few pennies in data transfer costs.

Oh! You’re probably wondering what the title for this section is supposed to mean. Well, the thing is, W760 is apparently not supposed to be marketed as a music phone, but instead a fitness phone with music functionality. Still, Sony Ericsson are bundling it with no less than three music accessories. Weird…

Lots of games!

The W760 comes with no less than six pre-installed games for your gaming needs.

Asteroids is an old classic. The game is all about destroying asteroids and UFOs with your own spaceship. You can play the game in various modes - the classic mode, theme mode, and powerup mode. The classic one is definitely the most nostalgic one, and probably also the one most people will stick with, just for the nostalgic gameplay. The two other modes can also be played in a new “modern” way.

Extreme Air Snowboarding is well-known for Sony Ericsson enthusiasts, as it has been pre-loaded on a set of Sony Ericsson phones. It is a nice 3D action snowboarding game, and is without doubt the best snowboarding game for feature phones. It’s fun to play, lots of challenges, although it can be completed, and nice graphics as well.

Guitar Rock Tour is a game very much like Guitar Hero. A rock band is playing in the background, and your job is to press numerous keys according to the beat of the song and alike. It’s actually rather fun, and it works better on a mobile phone than I had thought.

Need for Speed Pro Street is a really nice 3D racing game that makes use of the built-in accelerometer in the W760. This means you can steer the cars either by the d-pad or by moving, tilting and playing around with the phone. This way of gaming is rather nice, and seems intuitive for most, although it takes a minute or two to get the hang of. It can not only be played in portrait mode, also landscape mode, which generally works better for racing games.

RollerCoaster Rush 3D is yet another 3D game, and it is a really entertaining one. In the game you’re in charge of a series of challenging roller coasters, and you must give your passengers the most joyful ride possible without hurting anyone or crashing a coaster train. It may sound easy, but the majority of the tracks are anything but easy to ride.

Super Breakout is the last game on the W760. It’s a rather basic game of breaking blocks with a number of balls bouncing on your paddle. There’s a total of five phases, each containing ten game levels. Many people will find this game entertaining, especially as it’s a bit nostalgic and breaks the habit of advanced 3D games.

Auto-rotating webbrowser

The W760 is a quad-band GSM phone with support for EDGE, tri-band UMTS and HSDPA networks. In addition to that, it supports Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR for enhanced data rates. Bluetooth speeds are at about 140 kilobytes per second, which is a very high speed. It supports the A2DP profile for wirelessly streaming audio via Bluetooth. It is also possible to connect the phone to a computer or printer via USB. Data transfers are rather speedy when in file transfer mode, although it’s not as fast as on Sony Ericsson’s W960. W760 does not support infrared data transfers.

The default web browser is Access NetFront 3.4. It’s a good browser for feature phones, although the mighty Opera Mini is better. NetFront 3.4 features a mouse-like cursor that makes it easier to browse and navigate the web on your mobile phone. To make it even easier to get a nice overview of the website, it also features a full size zoom feature, which is very neat.

NetFront 3.4 supports CSS, HTML, xHTML, and light Javascripts. It cannot display any Flash content. The browser automatically rotates if you tilt the phone to landscape mode.

It comes with a built-in Google search feature, and a link to Sony Ericsson’s music service, m-buzz, on the homepage. You can also handle your web feeds, history, and your bookmarks from the homepage.

If a website supports RSS feeds, you’ll be alerted in the shape of a small RSS icon at the top of the browser window. You can then add the RSS feed, if you want to subscribe. If you don’t like to go to the RSS feed menu each time you want to check your feeds for updates, you can place the feeds directly on the standby screen. This works great!

The W760 supports most common e-mail services, including Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail, although you’ll have to manually set up everything yourself (either IMAP4 or POP3).

Advanced contact management

The W760 can store up to 1000 contacts, and 7000 numbers. This should be enough to cover most people’s needs. Contacts can be stored with the following information;

• Name
• Number (Mobile, Mobile (private), Mobile (work), Home, Work, Fax, and Other)
• E-mail (up to 3 e-mail addresses)
• Web address
• Picture
• Contact-specific ringtone
• Voice command
• Work information (Title, Company, Street, City, State, Zip code, and Country)
• Personal information (Street, City, State, Zip code, and Country)
• Info (a note)
• Birthday (can be added to the calendar)

I doubt most people will need more options than that.

You can do backups of your contacts, send all at once, set up a business card, set up your own contact details, speed dials, and create special contact groups.

Superior for messages

W760 supports both MMS and SMS messaging. The messaging client is also capable of dealing with voice messages, although I haven’t been able to test this out.

The message editors are simply ingenious, and the T9 dictionary - and the use of it - is miles ahead of any competition! Because W760 supports EMS, you can add smilies, sound effects, animations, and small black/white pictures. If you’ve set up a set of templates, you can also quickly add one or several of these without ever leaving the editor. You can add a large variety of special symbols; make use of copy/pasting; change writings options, such as the writing language, dictionary, word predictions and word suggestions. If the word you’re trying to write is not in the dictionary, you can of course add it to the dictionary for both the current purpose and future purposes.

W760 also features an IM client built into the messaging application. I have never really tried it out that much myself, but I remember it being a bit popular some years back, and apparently it’s capable of connecting to quite a few IM services.

No video calls

Calls can be made by either dialling a contact from the excellent built-in phonebook, or by dialling the phone number on the standby screen. If you do the latter, the W760 will not only act as a phone, it will also automatically search your list of contacts for any usable information based on the key combination you’ve pressed. Let’s say I want to call a guy called Michael, whose number happens to be in my phonebook. As I press the following key combination, the W760 will automatically filter the contacts based on my inputs; six (for ‘M’), four (for ‘i’), two (for ‘c’), and four (for ‘h’). So, basically we’ve just entered part of a phone number, but we’ve also performed a search for any contacts matching this certain key combination. It’s bloody clever, and it works a treat, although it gets a bit slow if you’ve got a load of contact entries.

Although the W760 supports UMTS (3G) and HSDPA (3.5G) networks, it is only possible to perform regular 2G cellular calls on it, as it does not feature a video call camera. Even without it, I think Sony Ericsson could easily have added the software functionality - just for the sake of having it there.
Regular calls are fine on W760. I found the earphone volume sufficient, and the overall network call clarity was definitely approved, as well. This is - of course - network dependant, and it may be better or worse depending on your carrier and network.
The overall network reception is good, and I was never left without a signal.

The call manager holds a total of up to 30 calls. In my opinion, the call manager could easily have been enhanced a bit. It would indeed have been nice to check the length of a call, or at least to also include when the call ended.
Calls are separated in four tabs, one for each kind of call, based on whether it was an incoming or outgoing call, and if it was an incoming call, if it was missed. The last of the tabs - well, actually the first tab - acts as the overview-tab.

Conclusion

It is hard to dislike W760. Sure, it does have its disadvantages, but it makes up for that and much more with its many advantages. The biggest disadvantage has to be the lack of WLAN for wireless accessing the Internet through a router.

When it comes to pricing, I’m not quite sure what to think of W760. In Denmark the W760 costs about £250 SIM-free if you want either the grey or the red variant. The price is lowered by a nice 30 quid if you’re looking for the black one. As said earlier on in the review, I am not sure whether or not the sales package I received is the same as everywhere else. Had it been, it would have been a very good price. If it’s not, I think it could be just a bit cheaper, although you’ll still be getting a good phone at an affordable price tag.

The battery performance could be better. It’s not really that bad, but it’s definitely not that good either. The W760 lasts for about three days of normal use. If you compare it to W890, a much thinner phone than W760, you’ll quickly see that W890 is capable of lasting at least a day more than W760, even though it’s thinner.

The Sony Ericsson W760 left a good impression on me. It’s definitely a recommendable phone, and even though the initial price — might — be a notch too high, I don’t doubt for a second that this will be a hit among adults as well as youngsters.

[Review based on firmware revision R3BA035]