W660i

Good Gear Guide

The stylish 3G enabled W660i from Sony Ericsson is the latest in the Walkman range, and it boasts a slim form-factor and Walkman 2.0 software.

Pros

  • Solid build quality, bright clear screen, user interface

Cons

  • Cramped keypad, a little expensive for features offered

Bottom Line

The W660i has a solid, polished feel and comes with a slick user interface, but the cramped keypad is a downside

Would you buy this?

  • Price

    $ 649.00 (AUD)

The W660i has the usual main features you'd expect from a modern phone - MMS, SMS, email, instant messaging, Bluetooth, and USB 2.0. Video calling is also available.

It has a bright, well illuminated 262k colour screen with a resolution of 176x220 pixels. The default 'Walkman' theme has a slick, clean feel and the large text is easy to read. We noticed that the alternate themes can slow down the responsiveness of general navigation, and can be a little slow to light-up from standby. The viewing angle of the display is impressive.

The W660i comes with 16MB of in-built memory, and our review unit was supplied with a 512MB Sony Memory Stick Micro via the expansion slot.

Getting organised is easy thanks to a robust feature set of alarm, calendar, notes, reminders, task list, and timer. All note-type features are able to set reminder alarms to go off, just in case you need another reminder at a later time or date.

As this is a Walkman phone, the MP3 player that comes with it is feature packed, but keep in mind that extra memory will have to be added for more than a few songs. Navigation is easy and simple, with album artwork, time, and track number shown while playing audio. Unfortunately, the text size for the song information is small and is sometimes hard to read in bright light. The W660i includes proprietary earphones; if you want to use your own, you'll have to purchase a 3.5mm adaptor.

The quality of the 2 megapixel camera with 2.5x digital zoom is very good in a well-lit area. The clarity of the pictures we took in a general office environment under 'normal' mode were impressive with their crispness. The camera offers additional features such as video, shoot mode, night mode, self-timer, effects, white balance and picture quality. Shoot mode gave additional options such as panorama, framing and burst.

One interesting feature the W660i comes with is 'TrackID', a service which allows you to take a small recording of a song from the radio or speaker, then send it over the internet. You will then get a reply of the information of the song, including song title, artist, and album name if it is available.

As nice as it looks and feels, the black coating on the W660i smudges very easily and does detract from the smooth finish. Controls consist of a five-way keypad, two selection keys, two back/clear keys and two shortcut keys. Both the backlit navigational keys and the keypad are small, so they can be frustrating at times when navigating the menus or quickly typing a SMS.

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