We thought mixing gold and silver was as tacky as the Argosjewellery counter, but the Sony Ericsson W705 Walkman makes it look good. Witha brushed-metal front and a stylish, squarish design, it's just bling enough... without looking like it's trying too hard.
Sony Ericsson W705 Walkman
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
As a member of the Walkman range, the W705 packs in themusic features, but its lack of a standard 3.5mm headphone socket is a seriousdisappointment. You can pick it up for around £270 or free from some networks.
Walk with me, rockwith me
Sony Ericsson tried hard to make the W705's audio quality as good aspossible, and we think it succeeded. We compared the sound of alossless WAV file on the W705 to a dedicated MP3 player -- the excellent-sounding SanDisk Sansa Fuze -- using some beautiful AudioTechnica headphones, and found the difference in sound quality wasalmost imperceptible.
Even the included in-ear headphones weren't bad at all,although as in-ear jobbies they could never stand up against full-sized cans.
The handset includes an FM radio -- the most underratedfeature in showbusiness -- with TrackID, which can identify a song based ona few-second clip. We found TrackID worked perfectly for the songs we tried frompop radio, and failed gracefully with things it didn't recognise, such as speech.
It also has some wacky music features such as SensMe, whichdisplays your music on a graph of happy/sad and fast/slow. It was accurate enough withour music, but we're not sure if we would take advantage of it.
You can store a good chunk of your music library on theW705's 4GB memory stick, or upgrade to up to 8GB if you need more. It also has120MB of onboard memory.
The biggest drawback of the W705 is the lack of a standard3.5mm headphone jack. The included adaptor is fine for hands-free use with theincluded (very short) headphones, but it's a metre long -- so when we used ourown headphones, we could have skipped like a boxer/small girl (delete as appropriate) with the cable. It also takes up thephone's USB port, which was inconvenient, since we had to unplug the headphonesevery time we wanted to transfer music. But it's got stereo Bluetooth, so itcould stream to a set of wireless headphones.
As befits a Walkman, the W705 has dedicated music playerbuttons up front. It also has fun shake controls: wobble the handset to shufflethe playlist, snap it left and right to skip tracks, and tilt it up and downto control the volume. The problem is you have to hold down the tinyWalkman button on the top to activate the controls. The button is about 1mm square and it's flush with the phone, so even our tiny claws couldbarely cling to it. We struggled to hold it down while shaking the phone, whichis a must for one-handed operation and undermined the whole idea of shakecontrol.
Missing in action
Other than that disaster, the user interface is good, although strangely itlacks one or two things that we loved in other recent Sony Ericsson phones,such as the C510.For example, the W705 supports podcasts and RSS feeds, but our samplewas missing the menu option for the application that manages them. We couldstill get the feeds through other paths, but it lost the W705 some ease-of-usepoints.
We wish we could say the same for Sony Ericsson's PC-syncingsoftware. The phone synchronises easily and quickly, but the media manager ishorrendous, which is bad for a music phone. It supports drag and drop, but it'snot clear which media files are supported. It also reorganises files by albummetadata, which we found annoying since we have our music organised in our ownspecial anal-retentive way, thanks very much.
But we found dragging and dropping music files worked finein the PC-syncing software, and the C510 supports transferring multimedia fileswith other applications, so take advantage of that instead.
Snappy snapper
The W705 is more than just a music phone. It also has a 3.2-megapixel camera,although it only has an LED photo light and no flash, so it's best forsnapshots in good light. We liked the camera's clear, accurate colourreproduction, but even leaning it on a solid surface in a well-lit room wefound it hard to take pictures that weren't blurry. On the other hand, we wereimpressed by the shutter speed: there was almost no delay between pressing theshutter and taking the picture.
Our photos looked good on the 61mm (2.4-inch), 320x240-pixel screen, andthe phone also has accelerometer, which means you can rotate your photosbetween portrait and landscape by just turning the phone.
The screen would have been great for viewing stuff on thebuilt-in YouTube and BBC iPlayer apps, but neither worked on the handset wetested on the CNET Wi-Fi network. YouTube loaded fine, but when we playedvideos, they were blank. iPlayer was the same -- we could browse the site, butcouldn't watch videos -- but things may work better on another wirelessnetwork.
The W705 has great connectivity, with Wi-Fi and speedy 3G (HSUPA),which is handy for downloading tracks and podcasts quickly and avoiding datacharges while on your home wireless network. It doesn't have GPS, but thebuilt-in Google Maps works by using nearby phone masts to triangulateyour position. It found our location in central London within a few streets, soit will tell you if you're in the right neighbourhood, but won't help you findthe exact address.
All these powerhouse features are bound to be a drain, but wewere impressed with the battery life. It's quoted at 10 hours of talk time and 400 hours ofstandby time using GSM, or 4 hours of talk time and 350 hours onstandby on 3G. We found that even playing music and surfing with 3G and Wi-Fi,the battery still showed as over half full after a day.
Conclusion
The W705 has great audio quality and looks, nailing that difficult classy blinglook. But despite a wealth of useful features, such as Wi-Fi, it suffers from ahandful of clangers: the Walkman button is tiny and hard to press, making shakecontrol almost impossible; there's no standard 3.5mm headphone jack; and themusic transfer software is awful.
It all makes us wonder if we shouldn't waitfor the W995,launching in the second quarter of this year, which will be Sony Ericsson'sfirst phone with a 3.5mm headphone jack and its new Media Gosoftware. But with Son Eric's habit of leaving us hanging for new phones, wewon't hold our breath.
Edited by Nick Hide