Sony Ericsson W890 Walkman Phone

Permalink: Sony Ericsson W890 Walkman Phone by Franz Bicar

With the new year came Sony Ericsson’s new phone, the W890 Walkman Phone. It has a super-slim styling and clean-cut lines that will definitely satisfy your fashion vanity. This is combined with a massive 2GB storage add-on and a 3.2 megapixel camera that users of this handset will never go wrong.

The w890 walkman phone, as the name implies, is one Sony Ericsson’s walkman phone that has already been tried and tested by music lovers all around.

The phone comes in three different colors, Espresso Black, Mocha Brown, and Sparkling Silver. It’s neat and sleek exterior won’t fail SE fan’s expectations. The W890 is a stunning 9.9 mm thick and weighs 78 g with a 2″ display. The Sony Ericsson W890 exterior is dominated by straight lines and clean shapes. The minimalist design has crammed the keypad all the way down the front, but still the tiny alphanumeric buttons proved to be more comfortable than they look.

Aside from this, the W890 also sports a 2-inch display, as mentioned, with 256K QVGA TFT display that’s brightly lit and produces great images. The phone consists of 2 camera’s, the main camera at the back and a secondary one on front.

As the Sony Ericsson is a Walkman phone, prospect buyers will definitely want to hear about its voice quality. Overall, the W890 offers very good voice quality. The HSDPA enabled quad-band handset offers good signal reception so that you can clearly hear the person you are talking to on the other side. One thing that’s worth mentioning though is that the W890’s ringing is neither loud nor balanced enough. The loudspeaker seems to do poorly at trebles and basses, too.

After the voice quality, we have its user interface. The W890 has the well known Sony Ericsson feature phone styling, spiced up with a few recently introduced features. The new features in the W890 include the optimized Media Center and Flash Lite 2.0 support, the Walkman 3.0 player with SensMe feature.

As most previous models, the W890 comes with a dedicated Flight mode. In active stand-by mode the screen displays information about the network signal, battery strength, current date and time, plus the next alarm due. Pressing the navigation key in any of the four directions can start a user-programmed feature or application. The main menu itself is a 4 x 3 grid of animated icons, each of which can be directly accessed by pressing its corresponding alphanumeric key. All sub-menus are in list view with tiny icons on the left side. Response is fast in every submenu and application.

The W890’s phonebook can store up to 1000 entries with a total of 7000 phone numbers available. The phonebook interface makes good use of the three-soft-key layout. A good feature is the Smart Search, which lists all available contacts in the phonebook starting with the digits typed in the standby screen. The search engine looks up both letter combinations in names and phone numbers that start with the digits entered.

Also present is the Send All Contacts option that transfers the entire phonebook to another compatible Sony Ericsson device.

The email client in W890 supports dozens of settings and all types of encodings, inherent to more advanced messaging devices. Sony Ericsson W890 can save attachments, no matter if they are supported or unknown file formats. Email messages can be sorted by size, date and time.

Office documents as Word, Excel and PDF cannot be opened, of course. Viewing a message in fullscreen mode and changing the font size (small, medium, large) are handy options. There is a separate Manage email application, with the same structure and features as the one for SMS.

As the phone’s name implies, this is a great multimedia device. The Sony Ericsson W890 features the Walkman 3.0 player with the SensMe feature. The player supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, E-AAC+, WAV, M4A, G-MIDI 1, SP-MIDI, RealAudio 8, iMelody and XMF file formats and sports the MegaBass equalizer preset.

The Media center menu lists the Photo, Music, Video, and Settings icons. The current pick is highlighted and the count of included files is displayed. The Media center is also accessible through the sixth icon in the main menu.

The video player, previously found in the entertainment sector, is now accommodated in the media center as well. It supports fast-forwarding and rewinding, as well as playing clips in slow motion. The interface is simple but stylish, although it fails to impress from a functional point of view. Again, the video files are accessible via the file manager.

The Sony Ericsson W890 has a 3.2 megapixel camera with no autofocus, nor flash. The user interface is Cyber-shot SE v2.0, as seen in W910. The major benefits are the pop-up sub-menus enhanced with icons and the Multi Menu packing all the available settings.

Camera options include shooting mode, picture size, night mode, self-timer, white balance, effects, and the all-encompassing Multi Menu. All the camera settings are displayed in two menu columns: the left displays the features and the right shows which setting is in use. Pressing OK on the navigation key lists all options of a certain feature. The settings on the menu are: Picture Quality, Review, Save to, Shutter sound and Reset counter. Stabilizer, ISO settings and BestPic are not present here.

The W890’s camera is not that great however. Compared to other SE Cybershot camera phones, the W890’s cam is lacking. Lack of detail is an underlying drawback; still colors come out relatively well. The produced images are tangibly noisy, regardless of the shooting conditions. Purple fringes are also clearly visible, especially in high contrast scenes.

Sources:
http://www.letsgomobile.org
http://mobile.softpedia.com
http://justamp.blogspot.com