Sony Ericsson W900 / W900i / W900c
Discontinued 17th October 2005
The Sony Ericsson W900 is the fourth "Walkman"
phone in Sony Ericsson's range, and the first one with
3G. It's a rotating phone, like the W550i
and W600a
and has a 2.2" 240x320 pixel TFT display in 262,000
colours, a 2 megapixel digital camera, expandable memory
using Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo modules and Bluetooth.
Internal memory is a huge 470Mb, which means that
most users of the W900 won't need to expand the handset's
memory at all. With 2G memory cards also available from
retailers, the combined memory of the W900 rivals the
hard-disk based Nokia
N91 and Samsung
i300 handsets.
When
the W800i
was released, we complained about it not being 3G. Well,
the W900 is 3G, and it supports over-the-air
downloads of multimedia tracks, which should be a boost
to any network operator who supports this feature. The
W900 supports MP3, AAC, and AAC+ audio formats, plus
others. You can plug a standard 3.5mm set of stereo
headphones directly in too. The Sony Ericsson W900 also
comes with an FM radio.
It's more than just a music phone though, and the
W900 also supports games in both portrait (tall) and
landscape (wide) screen modes, comes with a WAP browser
and email client. It also supports push email and comes
with an RSS reader.. handy for web sites such as Mobile
Gazette that carry RSS feeds.
In keeping with the current crop of modern phones,
the Sony Ericsson W900 has a 2 megapixel digital camera
with autofocus and a camera light. Sony Ericsson are
quite pleased with the frame rate on the W900's video
camera at 30 frames per second, which is substantially
higher than many similar handsets. There's also some
picture editing software, plus Sony Ericsson's Quickshare
system for sending off pictures to friends. The W900
also supports video calling.
As with the W800i, the W900 comes with Sony Ericsson's
Disc2phone software and all the music features that
have made the W800i such a hit. There are stacks of
interesting multimedia features built into the W900,
so it should keep you amused for hours if you're that
way inclined.
It feels as though we're nitpicking, but this isn't
the perfect phone. Unlike recent Nokias and even the
W900's sibling, the Sony
Ericsson P990, this is not a smartphone,
so software expansion is limited. The W900 doesn't have
WiFi either, but that's still a rarity. Also, unlike
the Sharp 903 and Sharp 902, the W900 doesn't have an
optical zoom on the camera. These are all pretty minor
things though, and the W900 is definitely a first-class
handset.
One mystery though - the previous Walkman handsets
have all been based on another phone in the Sony Ericsson
range, the W800 is based on the K750,
and the W550 and W600 phones are based on the S600.
Presumably then, there's a Sony Ericsson S900
in the pipeline too.
Sony Ericsson indicate that the W900 should be in
the shops just in time from Christmas, in the W900i
configuration (for Europe and the rest of the world).
The release dates for the Chinese W900c version are
not yet known.
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Sony
Ericsson W900 / W900i at
a glance
|
Available:
|
Q4
2005
|
Network:
|
UMTS
(3G) + GSM 900/1800/1900
|
Data:
|
UMTS
(3G) + GPRS
|
Screen:
|
240x320
pixels, 262k colours
|
Camera:
|
2
megapixels (main)
|
Size:
|
Medium-large
rotator 109x24x49mm /
weight tbc
|
Bluetooth:
|
Yes
|
Infra-red:
|
Yes
|
Polyphonic:
|
Yes
|
Java:
|
Yes
|
Battery
life:
|
2.2 hours talk / 12 days standby
(3G) 8.4 hours talk /
14 days standby (GSM)
|
|
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