The Sony Ericsson W960i is made of high quality materials and is much lighter than you would imagine. I was suprised when i (finally) got it in my hands! It also fits perfectly in the hands and you will love it...
The keyboard is amazing! Is silent (not like other phones), great for typing but for gaming you will need a little bit practice.
The virtual keyboard is cool and easy to use with the great stylus. The virtual keyboard is very usefull when you need to type a big web adress with symbols and numbers. Great feature!
Also the W960i doens't need to restart when disconnecting it from a computer (like my W810i...). You just disconnect the USB cable from the PC and are ready to go! The transfer speed is WICKED SICK!! I transfered 1.97Gb of music in less than 5 minutes!! My W810i looks very very ancient in this feature... But when the phone is connected to a PC, you cannot access the phone's memory from the phone, beacuse it is used from the PC.
At the bottom of the phone, where you put the charger, has a led that blinks at red color when the phone's battery is nearly empty. And when the phone is charging the led is green but doesn't blink. The battery life will never let you down!! You will forget to charge the phone lol! Much much better than my W810i battery!
The sound quality is briliant and crystal clear! The speaker is very loud and i think the guy at http://www.esato.com/ PeterKay was right! W960i is the loudest Walkman phone. Also the speaker has better bass and drum performance than other phones. But the wired headphones are the same like all the other Walkman phones have in their box. It is true that the W960i headphones are not very loud! I'm 100% sure that this phone can provide crazy power to the headphones but something in the phones software doens't allow it! It can be fixed with a firmware update. I mean don't expect from the headphones to "hurt" your ears.
The phone keyboard locks and unlocks by pressing the " * " on the keyboard and the "Lock/Unlock" option in the touchscreen. It's not like all the other SE phones where you use only the keyboard to do this. In W960i you'll need to use both keyboard and touchscreen. But it is cool ;)
The equalizer is better than the W810i. The difference between the 11 presets is big. The 11 presets are "Mega Bass", "Loudness", "Treble Boost", "Normal", "Rock", "Party", "Pop", "Dance", "Jazz", "Classical" and "Spoken Word".
The Walkman Player is just great! Excellent! The visual effects are colourfull and cool! It has also a "Search" option in the Walkman Player to find whatever you want fast. The option "Search" searches in real time like the Windows Media Player 11.
The radio has also the same visual effects like the Walkman Player and is great. It has also the "Track ID" ready to record the song you want from the radio.
In the messaging the only disadvantage is that you cannot change the typing language! For example, if you have selected the English language as the default language for the phone, you can type only in English! If you want to type in other language, you must change the phone language settings! The only way to avoid that is to type with the virtual keyboard, which gives you the option to choose between many languages, but it's boring to "call" everytime the virtual keyboard and choose another language... This problem can also be fixed with an Firmware update. Also when writing a message you can also edit the text with the options "Bold", "Italic", "Underline" and "Strike Through". You can also input smilies.
W960i makes great job in multitasking! It can easily handle about 6 tasks without lagging. You can also end a task in order to save more RAM memory or jump from one task to another!
The 2.6" touchscreen is great for watching video clips, playing games or surfing the internet. Some games are not compatible with the W960i because of the touchscreen. The W960i comes with 2 preinstalled games. The 1st is the well known "Quadra Pop" and the 2nd is a 3D golf game "Vijay Singh Pro Golf 3D". The 2nd game if fully compatible with the W960i and can be played aslo by pressing the touchscreen.
Many people say that W960i is useless because it doesn't support HSDPA and EDGE. Well... i have to say that i'm excited about how fast does the W960i access the internet using the 3G!!! It is fast like a bullet!! I used the phone default browzer (Opera 8) to access the site http://www.gsmarena.com/ and the page loaded fully after 2-3 seconds pressing the "Open" button!!! Who needs HSDPA? 3G is much faster than i imagined! I don't exagerate. Also the 3G speed can be differ from place to place and access day time. If you access the Internet at night you will notice that the speed is like a PC broadband connection!! My W810i does not support 3G but GPRS and EDGE and i'm very pleased by the speed it access the internet! Now W960i took me to the next level with it's amazing speed!
When you press the battery icon on the touchscreen, it shows you in % the battery level.
The Video Playback quality is just amazing. I have tested only mp4 video files at 1600kbps maximum.
I made a mistake about the W960i supported bitrate in mp4 format. The red text below is wrong!
The SE W960i laggs at 1600kbps video data rate (mp4). But it can play easily mp4 video files at 1000-1200kbps.
The W960i can play at 1500kbps and over... At ~2300kbps it cannot play videos with steady FPS!
I will test more video types at different data rates and let you know... Also in the W960i manual it sais that it supports MPEG-4, H.263, H.264, WMV9 and Real Video
You can put the Walkman Player like a wallpaper and control it faster. You just press the Walkman Player once and then the touch buttons (below the screen) turn on and u can change song or stop the music. If u double press the Waklman Player, then it opens fully. Also when the Walkman Player is set like a wallpaper, the visual effects are still visible and the phone looks even more better!
REVIEW UPDATE
The Stylus is plastic, but high quality and it is hard to break.
All themes can be previewed before installing, and also all the sound alerts included in a theme.
The menu is a little bit laggy but you don't have to worry about that. You will notice that after using the phone, the interface will run fatser.
The Flash and Auto Focus are not available when recording video.
The phone's default web browzer Opera 8 is very good and fast like the OperaMini for the low-end java phones. The Opera 8 can handle many open web pages at the same time like the Internet Explorer 7. It also supports JavaScript, Plug-Ins and Pop-Ups. There is an option that can block or show all Pop-Ups. With the Opera 8 you can add bookmarks, save pages, find something in the web page with a search tool, zoom a web page, find visited pages , send a web adress as MMS, Bluetooth and SMS, set the wiew as "Full Screen", "Landscape" and "Fit To Screen". With the big and briliant touchscreen, the stylus, the 3G, Wi-Fi and the endless space to save whatever you download... the mobile web browsing is taken to the next level...
The W960i has a "mini-office" software preinstalled and it is called "Quick Office" (v3.6.61.2). With this software you can create, edit or wiew Word, Excel and .txt documents. You can edit the text by using the common Microsoft Office options, like Bold, Italic, Underline, Text and Cell color, alignment, text ffects etc... It is possible also to use logical expresions when creating or editing Excel documents, like SUM, AVERAGE and much more. It is also possible to insert, rename and delete sheets and freeze the panes in Excel documents. The Quick Office saves automatically a document when you switch to another task from the Task Manager or when somebody is calling you, so you don't have to worry about lost projects. I used my W960i Word Editor to make this review update. You will love this great and usefull application!
The W960i can also view PDF files with a special software that is also preinstalled in the phone. PDF files cannot be edited but you can change the font and follow the links included in the PDF. Offcourse you can set the view to Fullscreen, Landscape etc...
Installing and unistalling applications is a very easy job. The W960i doesn't install software that don't "pass" the security test it does before installing! Before installing a software, the phone shows you the Version and Supplier of the software.
Adding music files to the Walkman library is very easy and very fast. You just open the Walkman Player and go to "More - Update Music" and that's all! It shows you in real time how many music files and playlists it has found. And you can also include or exclude the soundracks from Video Clips and Movies you have in the phone!!
When you activate the W960i, there are already 2 tasks running in the backround. The 1st is Messaging and the 2nd is the Contacts.And the W960i has about 74.9 Mb free RAM memory at Start up.
You can choose between 35 languages when typing with the Virtual Keyboard.
The W960i battery is 950mah.
Some people say that the W960i cannot order the music files by name. The W960i file manager CAN order all file types by Name, Date, Size and Type!
It takes about 1 minute (it worth the waiting...) to boot up fully and about 7-9 seconds to turn off. The phone could turn off much faster but it shows a 3D animation of the SE and that adds a few seconds. Thats not a serious reason not to buy the W960i...
The W960i is a little bit laggy sometimes but it is a very reliable and stable phone (at least mine). I got mine on December 17 and till now it didn't reboot by itself ("to improve performance...") or freeze not even once! Even with heavy multitasking the W960i works perfectly!
In the gaming, the W960i is just great! The big and bright touchscreen, which is compatible with some games, make the W960i look like a portable gaming machine! I have tested 49 Java games and only 3 sis games all in 240x320 resolution. Some games like the "Asphalt 3 Street Rules 3D" are not steady in the W960i. I mean that they don't have always the same Frame Rate, although they are playing sometimes very smoothly, about 20-25 fps i guess. Maybe these games are made to play better in Nokia phones. Who knows?
Games like "NFS Most Wanted, Age of Empires III, Call of Duty 4, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, Project Gotham Racing, Pro Evolution Soccer 7" and much more play very well without problem because of the "OpenGL SE" accelerator , the 128Mb RAM and the 100% combatibility with the W960i!
UPDATE
POSITIVES
Click on the link below to download all the apps i have installed in my W960i :
http://rapidshare.com/files/92285593/My_W960i_Apps.rar.html
You can find great games & apps at :
http://mobile-gamer.blogspot.com/
http://rellik232.googlepages.com/mobilegames
http://dibosmobile.blogspot.com/search/label/Sony%20Ericsson%20Games
http://www.box.net/shared/ffc432ss8f
Feel free to ask anything about W960i (but not about price and release date in), at: