Has Sony Ericsson finally brought the best Walkman phone yet to the U.S.? Check out our in-depth Sony Ericsson W760 review.
Review summary of the Sony Ericsson W760:
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 If the Sony Ericsson W580i was a solid music phone (it was), the Sony Ericsson W760 is a solid 3G phone all around. The great music player hasn't gotten any worse with age, though we'd like it to get a little better. The best part is how much the W760 benefits from U.S. 3G access. Calls sounded great on AT&T's HSDPA network, and Web browsing speeds were very good. Even better was the tethered modem support, a nice surprise for a phone that seems to be all about music. The PC Suite let us synchronize our Outlook contacts and calendar, which was another nice surprise, and they kept coming. Don't expect much from the gaming capabilities and you won't be disappointed. Don’t expect much from the camera and you'll be pleased. Navigation was a miss, more of a bonus than a worthwhile feature, but there was such a nice mix of near-hits and Bulls-eyes that the phone comes out a winner in the end. Release: June 2008. Price: $100.
Pros: Fast network speeds. Solid music player. Great call quality. Good PC sync capabilities. Good Web browser.
Cons: No IM for messaging, nor IMAP for Gmail. Music app could use some polish. Media Manager needs improvement. Music phones are better with 3.5mm headphone jack.
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Full Sony Ericsson W760 Review:
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Design - Very good
Our biggest complaint with the Sony Ericsson W760 that we reviewed is that we didn't get our choice of colors, and so we were stuck with the bland silver model, instead of the other, more striking color combinations we've seen at trade shows. The phone is a smoothed out update to the Sony Ericsson W580i. It is, at the same time, more business-like and more sporty, with a goofy looking textured grill under the lower lip of the slide. It loses the flashing lights that the W580i had on the side, but upgrades the camera and the network speeds significantly.
The Sony Ericsson user interface hasn't seen much of an update over the last couple of generations, at least not on the phones available in this country. Still, we like the rich, colorful display and the polished icons, and Sony Ericsson does have some nice themes tucked away if you choose to download on your own. In addition to the standard menu, the phone has a nice media browser menu, reminiscent of the cross menu bar system on the Sony Playstation 3. Also, there's a customizable pop-up menu, with it's own dedicated key, if you want to row your own boat. Finally, the phone features a dedicated location-based services key that jumps to an LBS menu, and a Walkman key around the side.
Calling - Very good
Calls made from the Sony Ericsson W760 sounded very good, almost landline quality. The phone got fairly good reception on AT&T's 3G HSDPA network in suburban New Jersey, usually 3 bars of service while our Apple iPhone 3G struggles to find a single bar. Battery life was good, we got a little more than 7.5 hours in a single call. This is lower than the 9 hour estimate, but still impressive, considering we had HSDPA reception the whole time and that network is a known battery hog.
For calling features, the Sony Ericsson W760 gets some hidden talents from the Sony Ericsson PC Suite software. It's a bit on the buggy side, so we recommend searching the S/E site often for updates, but when it works you get full Outlook synchronization with your phone. That's a nice bonus for a 3G multimedia phone. The address book had plenty of fields, but we wish searching for contacts was more intelligent.
Conference calling was easy for connecting multiple calls. The phone uses speaker-dependent voice tagging for voice dialing. It's not our favorite method, but once we had programmed in a few of our most frequent numbers, it worked correctly every time. The speakerphone was nice and loud, though it didn't quite reach the raw decibles that the phone achieved while playing music, and we like to reap that benefit on musical speakerphones.
Messaging - Good
The keys on the Sony Ericsson W760 are probably one of the best improvements over the older W580i, and we like that Sony Ericsson has finally adopted a wider, dare we say more normal keyboard for a Walkman phone. The nubby keys on phones like the Sony Ericsson W880i had us worried, but the keys on the W760 are wide and soft. They rock a bit up and down, but this actually made typing more comfortable.
Unfortunately, there wasn't much to get excited about beyond the keyboard. Of course text messaging worked fine, as did simple MMS picture messaging. For e-mail, we downloaded settings from the Sony Ericsson support Web site directly to the phone. It's an elegant way to handle presets, and we had no trouble setting up our Gmail account for e-mail. Unfortunately, only POP3 access was available, and our inbox was instantly floodd with the last 100 messages we'd received, including all the spam that IMAP folders filter out. There was no instant messaging clients to speak of, other than Sony Ericsson's proprietary My Friends app, but we didn't give it a go. Perhaps if a carrier picks up this phone, it would benefit from a more standardized deck, in terms of messaging apps.
Music - Very good
The music player on the Sony Ericsson W760 isn't very exciting or slick, but it is very intuitive and easy to use. The Walkman player wasn't as responsive as we'd always remembered it, but we like the menus and easy controls. We like the easiest playlist maker on the market, and even the visualization and skin options weren't bad. The Sony Ericsson Media Manager software wasn't great, but it got better every time we updated the software. The last version we used, 1.2, wasn't buggy and didn't have some of the quirks weve seen in the interface, but it wasn't very fast. Transferring a few hundred MB of music took a long time, longer than we'd expect on an iPhone.
Media Manager was slow and unreliable when it came to the SensMe feature. SensMe supposedly analyzes music for pace and mood to help put together an appropriate mix. It's one of the bonus features on the W760. The phone also uses the accelerometer to help control playback. Hold the Walkman button and bounce the phone to the left or right, and you jump tracks. Shake the phone and you shuffle the songs. Weirdest of all, if you hold Walkman button and raise or lower your arm, you can raise or lower the volume. This seems like a party trick, since it would be much more convenient to use the volume rocker key on the side, but it worked, nonetheless.
Finally, we have to complain about the lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack on this music phone. The phone uses a pop-port corded microphone remote, and you can plug standard heaphones into that corded mic. But this means that unless you use the included short-cable headphones, you'll probably have a lot of extra wire hanging off of you. The benefits of pop-port have passed, and we think it's time Sony Ericsson moved to microUSB and 3.5mm headphone jacks, like Nokia did with the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic phone.
Web browsing - Very good
We were ready to dismiss the Web browser on the Sony Ericsson W760 as simple, but some menu digging turned up a few nice features. First of all, the browser is fast and effective. It churned out a perfect rendition of our homepage quicker than our iPhone 3G could, though it seems to quickly draw offscreen graphics as the pop up, which caused some slow down. We liked the accelerated scrolling for long pages, and we especially liked the "Pan and Zoom" mode, which acted like a mini-map for large Web pages, allowing the user to see a full-page view and pick the section for zooming.
Camera - Good
The 3.2-megapixel camera on the Sony Ericsson W760 also took fairly good pictures, for a cameraphone. Under the best lighting conditions, we got images that were vibrant and sharp, though perhaps over-sharpened at some points. Under lower lighting conditions, the phone clearly would have benefited from an auto focus feature, because things became a bit more blurry, though the phone did a fine job of handling light and color.
Old Red Sign
New Red Sign
The color on these two is rich and saturated, though the flowers in the second shot seem to be bleeding a bit. Still, there's nice detail in the leaves.
Fuzzy Face
Sure, there are some parts that are blown out from the bright light outside, and the noise makes this looks like a TV image at full resolution. There's still enough detail in the fuzz to make it a cute picture.
Living Room Panorama
A panorama, stitched in-camera, of our living room. We expected more of a seam between the photos, since the light levels were so different for all three, but the SE W760 did a fine job with the panoramas, and this is a fun feature to have on a phone.
Snake Eyes
Here's where the camera could have used better focus. The colors are good, though there are areas that are over-sharp and noisy. But the print starts to get blurry as we approach the edges of the card.
GPS Navigation - Good
It was admirable for Sony Ericsson to include a couple different navigation options, including the Wayfinder Navigator with spoken directions. GPS is still a rarity on Walkman phones, and this is one of the first Sony Ericsson phone's we've seen with a GPS radio. Unfortunately, Wayfinder had some serious problems. Everything was going fine until the GPS program told us to take a right off a bridge. Seriously, a sharp right off the Pulaski Skyway bridge. The maps Wayfinder used were problematic, and ultimately untrustworthy. Thankfully, Sony Ericsson also includes Google Maps with its own GPS support, but that app doesn't offer live turn-by-turn directions, let alone voice-guided navigation.
Odds and ends
The real hidden feature for this phone may be the tethered modem support. Of course, with the Sony Ericsson PC Suite any S/E phone, including the Sony Ericsson W350 we just reviewed, can be used as a modem. But the W760, with its tri-band HSDPA radio, was one of the fastest tethered devices we've ever used. In our tests we saw speeds approaching 1700 Kbps, which is faster than any other phone we've used, including Sprint's EV-DO Rev. A workhouse, the HTC Mogul. If the phone used a standard microUSB cable instead of the proprietary pop-port cable, we'd think it was perfect.
For gaming, the Sony Ericsson W760 uses the accelerometer as well as a couple extra buttons, placed at the top corners of the screen, as gaming controls, to mediocre effect. We tested the accelerometer playing "Need for Speed," which uses the motion sensor for steering. It wasn't at all sensitive, and every racing game we've played using the Apple iPhone in the same way provided a much better experience. Similarly, the shoulder buttons weren't anything revolutionary, just a couple extra buttons. From a manufacturer like Sony, we're waiting for something much, much bigger.
Speaking of waiting, we have no official word from Sony Ericsson on this, but we wouldn't be surprised to see this phone end up on AT&T. It would be a fine fit, since AT&T is the exclusive carrier for Sony Ericsson's other U.S. Walkman phone, the W580i, and their other U.S. 3G phone, the Sony Ericsson Z750 (check out our review here). So, we don't know anything for certain, but if AT&T picks up this phone it will certainly cost less than the $400+ street price we're seeing now.
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