The first Sony Ericsson phone where thin was definitely in was the Sony Ericsson W880i. It was designed with a handful of simple guidelines in mind – they wanted to come up with a slender fashion-savvy device that would do a perfect job as a secondary handset. But it had to bear a hefty price tag at that – a trade off for being eye-candy, wafer-thin and carrying a hyped brand. When the Sony Ericsson W880i only debuted, one didn’t even need to have any lowdown on the maker’s plans to figure out that a successor was coming. In contrast to other SE-branded offerings, this “music-heavy” solution came with no radio onboard, which was nonsense for Sony Ericsson even a year ago. Given the rate which certain models are getting updated at these days, the year we have been waiting for the W890i doesn’t seem all that much.

Design

The handset comes in three trims - Sparkling Silver, Black and Mocha Brown. All three colors are quite appealing, although the sales will kick off only with silver and brown editions being on offer – the W890i in black will come later, which is exactly the same thing they did with the Sony Ericsson W880i.

The handset measures 104x46.5x9.9mm, being marginally bigger than the W880i; plus it adds an additional 0,5mm to its girth. Could this be a deal-breaker? By no means, the phone is still petite and easily slips into just about any pocket. The W890i is also a lightweight, tipping our scales at just 78 grams.

They have tried to design the W890i along the same lines as the W880i, hence the metal accents on the front plate and aluminum battery cover. Unlike the W880i, this phone delivers a more metallic feel, and nicely chills your palms. The antenna is mounted in the bottom half of the handset, meaning that the surface there is all plastic styled after a metal plate. The W890i’s build quality is superb; the battery compartment cover feels very solid thanks to two latches it sits on. Over the month that we spent with this device, it didn’t get scuffed, scratched or damaged in a big way; so generally it did a good job keeping its pristine condition intact.

Perched on the left-hand side is the music key along with the Fast Port socket. Sitting on the right are the service LED, dedicated camera button and the volume rocker. The holes for a carrying strap are placed on the back of the phone, as well as the 3,2 Mpix camera lens. Detaching the battery cover you will find the M2 memory expansion slot.

Display

The display shows up to 262 K colors at 240x320 pixel resolution (2 inches diagonal, TFT, 30x40mm), which allows accommodating up to 8 text and 3 service lines in most applications; and when browsing web-pages, or handling e-mails or text messages, you can cram more lines into the display by decreasing the font size. The W890i handles direct sunlight in a convenient fashion – its display remains readable, however the diagonal proves somewhat insufficient, causing certain inconveniences.

This screen seems to be potent enough for most core features of the handset, although browsing web-pages with the W890i is not the most gratifying experience. In terms of picture quality, this is a decent display; however it ends up behind the Sony Ericsson W880i because of somewhat faded colors – despite trumping its predecessor diagonal-wise, the W890i still can’t match it in brightness and colors.

We also took the Sony Ericsson K660i for comparison purposes, in theory it had to retain the same display, but, surprisingly, we found out that the pictures offered by these two phones were immensely different – the W890i’s display was lackluster in comparison. Probably, the only legitimate explanation is that for such a slender handset they had to cut power consumption in every way possible.

Keyboard

The stumbling stone of the W880i was its keypad –many judged it by still pictures of the phone and deemed it awkward to use and crippled even before trying it. However the experience has shown that it is not the case, and the handset handles well, probably not as well as other solutions out there, but it is pretty much tolerable. So there was absolutely no reason for rumblings like “what a monstrosity” to unfold in the first place. Nevertheless, the maker has taken this criticism seriously and armed the W890i with conventional buttons – its number pad is average size-wise, but the keys feel cramped. Honestly speaking, we can’t say that the ergonomics of these particular buttons is way better than that of W880i. Exactly the same thing, but psychologically, most feel better about the new unit, for it seems more familiar. Our consciousness carefully notes that “Look, these are normal keys, they are comfortable in use, and what am I saying, you have used them so many times before – forget all these fancies!”.

Being so much into psychology, I carried out an experiment – I showed the images of the Sony Ericsson W880i and Sony Ericsson W890i to people who had never owned any of them. My question was always the same: “Which one has the better keypad?”. The vast majority of respondents assured me that the Sony Ericsson W890i was the winner. Then I took both phones out of my sleeve and asked them to try typing something with them. Interestingly, not so many people changed their mind (around 30%), so the majority of respondents kept claming that the W890i was better. The moral here is that all assessments of particular features are very subjective at times and have nothing to do with reality.

For truth’s sake I should mention that the W890i’s array of functional keys is crafted better – the keys themselves are still tiny, but now they are curvy and this makes for better usage experience. The handset comes bundled with an ambient light sensor that adjusts the white backlighting of the keypad, which is not very bright. Localized editions of the W890i, with two alphabets on them, have all miniscule symbols engraved right on the buttons.

Interface

There has been a major upgrade in interface of the W880’s successor. W890 runs on the same software, which is used in the rest of the high-class phones of the manufacturer, including W910 and К850. If you have experience with those two, you will be sailing in familiar waters.

The Home screen has not been changed; the functions of the two soft buttons and of the D-pad central key can be seen in the bottom part. Here we have the cool option for background animated GIF support as well.

The menu is also the same, displayed as a 3x4 grid of icons with a vertical list for the sub-menus. By the way, this one features Flash themes for the main menu, which can change its icons and the overall appearance of the phone.

Phonebook
 
You can save up to 1000 contacts, while each of them can store several numbers (up to 7000 numbers in total), e-mails and web addresses, as well as a personal picture and ring tone, or video-tone for indication when you have an incoming call. You can add contacts to groups, but you cannot set a common ring tone or a caller ID for a given group. Overall, this function is planned to be used only when you want to send a message to more than one contact for example. Finding a contact is done by directly entering letters from the keypad, but unfortunately, only the first word of the name is considered during the search. An option we really liked was to sort the names both by first and last name. However, if you’ve done it by last name, you will not be able to search by First name, which now appears as second word.

When you start dialing a number directly from the standby screen, you will find one of the tweaks, coming with the new firmware. The phone will search the phonebook and the calling history for matching results (for both numbers and names), just as it is with any WM6 or BlackBerry device. The convenience here comes from the fact that it searches the names as you type them, by using a predictive input system. For instance, if you want to dial “Neo”, you have to dial 636 (6-MNO, 3-DEF, 6-MNO) and almost immediately the phone will show you all matching names. Unfortunately, like in the contacts menu, the system won’t search through the second word of a name.

Organizer
 
Just as the Contacts, the Organizer menu has its own icon in the main menu. Its options include calendar, tasks, notes, alarms, calculator, timer, stopwatch, code memo, applications links, and synchronization option.

The Calendar can be viewed for a month, week, or a day; the latter option shows the events, set for the particular day, and it enables you to add new options. When you want to add appointments, you select the starting time, duration and the reminder’s time. You can include details about the venue of the event, as well as a description. You have the option of setting it as an All day event (all birth dates from the contacts list are added as such) and to include recurrence options (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly).

You can also save simple Tasks (reminder for Task or Phone Call) or write a plain note. The menu houses a Calculator with basic functionality, a Countdown timer, and a Stopwatch capable of storing up to nine results, as well. We think that the Code Memo option is useless and we will prefer to have a “safe” where we can save text information, LOCKED (not coded) by a password. Additionally, in this menu is the file manager, which was found in the main menu of phones with the earlier software version. It sorts the content by type and offers an option to filter either the phone or the card memory, or to view both at the same time.

Multimedia

The Sony Ericsson W890 features the Walkman 3.0 player with the SensMe feature. The player supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, E-AAC+, WAV, M4A, G-MIDI 1, SP-MIDI, RealAudio 8, iMelody and XMF file formats and sports the MegaBass equalizer preset. If you are not willing to use the media player step-by-step interface, you can directly play a file through the file manager with its classic flat structure. It's a shame Sony Ericsson W890 doesn't offer additional player skins.

On one hand, they are developing lovely flash themes, a few new ones found in each new release with revamped menus and effects, and on the other, the player doesn't get a single spare Walkman outfit for the weekends. We do hope our test unit only missed extra player skins because of its beta status. earching collections and creating playlists based on tempo and mood is the focus, instead of the well known artist or album filters. The interface is original and visually appealing, tracks appearing as dots in a dual plane, placed along a horizontal and vertical axis. This way you can circle a group of tracks that match your mood to create a playlist, or simply select individual tunes if you prefer.

You are also able to broaden or shrink the selection of tracks with the navigation key. An alternative for the phone's more conventional music catalogue, SensMe is the way to discover music that matches your current mood. If music on the W890 is uploaded via the Media Manager PC software, mood is directly assigned to each track. You are not able to assign it yourself. Furthermore, if you simply copy tracks trough the regular file browser, they will remain "unseen" for the SensMe matrix, so you are obliged to use the Media Manager to get the mood stuff. Another shortcoming is that managing music with Media Manager requires the phone to be set to Transfer mode, in which the phone is off for calls.

Camera

The W890’s camera is 3.2MP, but unfortunately, it does not have an autofocus or a flash. The interface is the same as seen in the W910. It starts in landscape mode, for approximately 3 seconds after pressing the camera shortcut button and uses the entire display as a viewfinder. The left software key opens the options menu, where you can set the mode (normal, panorama, frames, burst), resolution, and other settings like night mode, self timer, white balance, etc.

The detail is low for a 3.2-megapixel camera, but the colors are real and well saturated. The lack of autofocus influences the quality of the pictures and sometimes they are pretty blurry. We made a few attempts to take a picture in a dark environment without using the night mode, but were terrified by the heavy noise. We do not recommend snapping pictures in full darkness, because nothing will come out, since there is no flash. The camera records MP4 videos with QVGA resolution and 30 fps, which is way better than 3GP. The quality was not impressive, because the details are blurry and ugly.

Conclusion

Despite having 40-chord polyphony onboard, the W890i breaks no new grounds in the way MP3 tunes sound, as compared to other Sony Ericsson branded devices. The overall volume of this phone is pretty average, although occasionally you might miss calls while on a busy street. Honestly, the W890i just doesn’t deliver in terms of volume level at times, but we didn’t expect it even to have this in the first place. Playing many mp3 tracks full-out, the loudspeaker starts creaking and crackling a bit, which is a tradeoff for the W890i being a svelte device. The vibrating alert is below average strength-wise, meaning that you might not feel it when the phone is in your outerwear. Thankfully, we never experienced any trouble with the handset’s reception quality.

The W890i has a lot of things going for it – updated platform, HSDPA and EDGE connectivity, lightning fast interface and speedy3D applications. More importantly, not only does it trump its predecessor on these fronts, it also holds the upper hand against other A200-powered solutions that debuted earlier.