The flagship Walkman™ phone! The W950i is a Symbian 3G smartphone with an enormous touchscreen that supports handwriting recognition. It has a fabulous music player with 4 Gbytes of flash memory - that's enough for around 1,000 songs! There's also a built-in FM radio, plus support for office applications including email, attachment viewing, third party Symbian apps and full web browsing. The one thing missing is a camera. Also, be aware that like all smartphones, the user interface is sometimes slow and may occasionally freeze

The W950 boasts a solid construction and a stylishly designed body made out of matt plastic along with silver lining and orange highlights. Thanks to those, the orange Walkman theme has been kept all over the handset, while keeping successfully away from the flamboyant styling of some of the previous Walkman phones.

Measuring at 106 x 54 x 15 mm, the W950 could be hardly called a compact phone, but as far as smartphones go, it is in fact pretty slim. The probable reason for that is the absence of a camera. When it comes to width though, our friend has lot more to show. But width is essential in order to be able to use comfortably the Jog Dial single-handedly. And you may agree, that is of great importance since besides the stylus, it is the only way to navigate through the interface.

The W950i come with a large 262k colour touch screen (240 x 320 pixels) which provides the user with the perfect display & the use of the touch screen is an easy way to select menu options. The user will enjoy using the touch screen & find it an extremely user friendly way to manoeuvre around the phones menus.

No Camera.

Removing the back cover reveals the standard Sony Ericsson BST-33 Lithium-Polymer battery with a capacity of 900 mAh. According to the manufacturer, it should last up to 2.5 hours of talk time in UMTS networks and up to 7.5 hours in regular GSM networks. The expected standby time varies from up to 250 hours in UMTS networks to up to 340 hours in GSM ones. The battery should also be enough for up to 10 hours of listening to music. Unfortunately, we couldn’t test the phone’s battery life since we used the phone heavily during our tests and thus the battery life we experienced was not indicative for the real-life performance of the handset.

Music is the real focus of this phone. The W950i sounds as good as a dedicated MP3 player, and comes with an adapter that lets you use any music-player headphones. The wired adapter even has a built-in remote control. The included in-ear headphones are better than standard Apple iPod headphones, according to our music analyst Tim Gideon.

Sony Ericsson provides a very basic CD-ripping program called Disc2Phone, but you're most likely just to drag and drop music from your PC or Mac over a USB cable. In "fast file transfer" mode, where the W950I's 4GB of "media memory" appears as a hard drive, songs zip over in less than a second each. A third-party program, (SyncMyPortable) also lets the W950i sync with iTunes playlists on Microsoft Windows. The phone will play MP3, AAC, and WMA music files, but not protected music bought from an online store.

To activate the music player, just press the dedicated Walkman key. It's easy enough to use, sorting songs by artist, album, playlist, or "mood" (a tag you assign that's like a playlist) and offering a dozen equalizer settings. You can use the phone's scroll wheel to roll through your music library, and light-up buttons on the front of the phone let you pause, fast-forward, or rewind music. The only annoyance I ran into was that every time I added songs, I had to "update" the music library with a menu option.

The W950i makes a better music phone than a video phone. Though you can drag over short videos in iPod-compatible MP4 format (which takes up to 10 minutes or so), for longer videos you must use the mobile-phone–friendly 3GP format. Most 3GP converters default to creating low-quality videos for low-end phones. Too bad it's so hard to encode video for this phone, because landscape-format videos look great on the W950i's big screen.

Sony Ericsson's main pitch for the W950i is its onboard 4GB memory, which roughly stores 1,000 songs (of 4MB each). This, together with an additional 60MB for user data, rivals many of the portable music players in the market today in terms of storage capacity. That's all sweet on paper until you realize there's no memory expansion slot for easy sharing of files and documents with devices. There's Bluetooth and infrared, but they still can't beat the convenience of removing a memory card and slotting it into another host device to transfer data.

The Sony Ericsson W950 is a tri-band GSM phone with GPRS (Dual Mode UMTS 2100). It can easily run the entire gamut of mobile applications from messaging, web browsing, push email, video streaming, to 3D gaming. You can even employ the 4GB of storage to take important data with you. It's a very capable device that you can invest in without a second thought.

The messaging services include multimedia messaging (MMS), text messaging (SMS), email & instant messaging. The MMS service allows the user to send video, images, sound & text all together in one easy to create message to any MMS compatible mobile phone. The instant messaging service allows the user to send a message very easily & quickly to any contact that is online at the same time as the user. Emailing is made very easy for the user as the W950i comes with a push email feature.
The user will find surfing the Internet a very pleasurable & enjoyable experience with the help of the fast 3G technology. The phone comes with Bluetooth® wireless technology so therefore the user can connect wirelessly to any local Bluetooth compatible device & enjoy the wireless freedom. The W950i comes complete with Opera™ 8.0 which is the ultimate web browser & will provide the user with the Internet experience they have come to expect from their computer.

The phone comes with 3D Java™ games & it is possible for the user to download many more of their choice.

In some ways, the W950i is the phone that the P990i should have been! It's really got everything that you could want except a camera. The touchscreen is a delight to use, the music player is pure quality, and the phone is very well featured in other respects too. If you won't miss the camera and don't want to make video calls, this phone is highly recommended. The only thing that prevents us from awarding a full 10 stars is the fact that, like all Symbian phones, the user interface can sometimes be slow, and the phone does have a tendency to occasionally freeze or shut itself down.

Graphical equalizer and Mega Bass
Disc2Phone music management software
Stereo headphones in the box
FM radio with RDS
MusicDJ
Speakerphone
Streaming Audio/Video
Bluetooth stereo streaming support
4GB of storage space
Walkman MP3 player and stereo FM radio with RDS
Dedicated multimedia keys
3G support
Symbian 9.1 OS with the UIQ 3.0 user interface
Touchscreen with QVGA resolution
Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP profile, Infrared port and USB 2.0 support
Comes with a 3.5 mm audio jack adapter