Sony Ericsson W910 review: Walkman in style

Telephony

All the latest Sony Ericsson phones we've tested offer very good voice quality in making and receiving calls, and W910 is no exception. The quad-band handset offers great signal reception and ringing is powerful and crisp, so you certainly won't miss an incoming call even in noisy surroundings. This shouldn't surprise though, as this is a music-centered handset. The caller voice is clear and real.

Calling Dexter

Sony Ericsson W910 is among the loudest handsets we have tested in our loudspeaker loudness test. Here is how the W910 ranks along some of the other handsets we've measured. More info on our test and all current results can be found here.

Interface: old looks with a twist

The user interface in W910 has the well known Sony Ericsson feature phone style, spiced up with a few novelties. Besides the optimized Media Center and Flash Lite theme support, we have the debut of the Walkman 3.0 player with Shake control and the brand new SensMe feature. The auto rotate capability gives handling the phone extra flavor. As most previous models, the W910 comes with a dedicated Flight mode. When turning on the phone, you may opt to start it directly into Flight mode. The Sony Ericsson W910 cannot work in Flight mode unless a SIM card is inserted.

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.

Standby view • the main menu • a listed sub menu

Like Sony Ericsson K850 and T650, the W910 supports Flash Lite themes. All the preinstalled themes are Flash-based, Walkman being the default one. Flash themes are gradually gaining ground in Sony Ericsson handsets, which is a welcome effort. They are much more dynamic and attractive, with changes in the phone appearance affecting not only the color scheme and wallpaper, but also the menu icons and layout. Our favorite so far is the Under Water theme, which is the default one in T650, where home screen animations nicely overflow the keypad, changing its lighting in a very intriguing way. We installed it on W910 but again, as in K850, we found no keypad effects so this must be a feature reserved to T650 only. Flash theme support most probably has some limitations from one handset to the other. This is a minor issue, but a more fluent adoption of flash themes would be a benefit.

Back to W910, the themes take advantage of the handset's integrated accelerometer and the patterns and objects on the display react to every change of the position the phone.

Four of the preinstalled themes

The well-known Activity menu (with a dedicated shortcut on the D-pad) offers quick access to selected functions. The Running Apps tab inside it is in charge of multi-tasking. A feature we first saw in K850, allows minimizing the dialog window when you receive files via Bluetooth and opening the window on demand through the Running Apps tab. This is really convenient, as the phone is fully usable in the meantime, as opposed to other Sony Ericsson models, where you have to wait for the transfer to complete. Strangely, this is not the case if you're sending files to another Bluetooth device. The two available options are Cancel and Back, and both result in interrupting the file transfer. The Activity menu also offers quick access to recent events, the web menu and the My Shortcuts tab, which is a user-configurable list of favorite features.

No changes in activity menu