I’ve had plenty of time to play with the Sony Ericsson W960, the full review should be up on MobileBurn.com soon. However, given that the handset is based on the Symbian OS, I thought it would be interesting to compare it against the Nokia N95-3, which is my current primary handset.
The W960 features 8GB of internal storage, along with a proprietary data port, meaning you can only load up the music via the USB cord. Sony Ericsson also, unlike some other really successful cellphone manufacturers, has put together a rather user-friendly music management application for the desktop. You’d think, with such a fine setup of USB and convenient desktop management, that loading your handset up with tunes would be a breeze. Sadly, this is far from the truth.
It took a whopping 16.5 hours, nonstop, to transfer 7GB of music onto the W960, through the USB cord. Seriously, I wish I was kidding. It was ghastly. However, once you’ve gone without your phone for a full day to get the music on there, the Walkman portion of the handset is actually pretty decent. There’s a dedicated button in the middle of the handset, clearly marked with the Walkman icon, so there’s no guessing about what it does.
The actual music player application is completely beautiful. The background is an animated visualization, with my favorite being one that looked like a lava lamp. The interface is very lovely, laid out in a list which you can scroll up and down through. You can view your music according to artist, album, track, or mood. Oddly missing is the ‘genre’ sorting method, which was really annoying to me, as that’s how I usually listen to music.
The mood setting is something I thought was interesting, and well implemented. On both the desktop and mobile music managers, users can set the ‘mood’ of the track from a preset list of 5-6 moods. These are synced across when the phone is connected, and users can easily assign a mood, right from the now playing screen. Brilliant. Star ratings are also implemented in the same way, which works great and makes it simple to manage a large music library.
Overall, the W960’s data transfer speeds completely ruined the experience for me. With only 8GB, I’m sure to be changing up my on-phone music selection often, and I simply can’t leave my phone connected to my computer for 16hrs+ while the music is swapped out.
The desktop music manager made me even MORE anxious to get ahold of the desktop music manager that Nokia previewed at the Go Play event roughly 9 months ago.
