When we talk about music phone, W series from Sony Ericsson must be at the top ten chart if it is not the best one. Cool design with a complete features and new technology is SE’s perfect weapon to serve customers, especially young generation for such a music mobile phone. SE newest Walkman phone, W980 series perhaps is a good example to proof this mantra. The design, features, and technology that comes with this black-red clamshell is worth enough to make you spend some money from your bank account. But before you had gone through your local bank, let’s take a look inside first.

Design

The first impression is that the design is not the typical for Sony Ericsson. The phone looks old-fashioned and definitely different from all the rest. In the middle of the front, we have the external TFT display. That’s where the audio menu is visualized. It is controlled by the special button, located on the right side of the device.

Below the display, there are three touch sensitive buttons. They create the illusion that they have a relief, but actually, only the middle one is concave. In combination with the audio menu, controlling the music functions when the clamshell is closed, is relatively easy.

The lowest part of this side is a transparent strip. Behind it, you can see the Walkman logo, and when the music is playing, it blinks illuminated in orange.

On the right side, we have the volume rocker, the audio menu dedicated button, the slider for locking the touch keys, and one of the speakers. The other one is located on the opposite side, and over it, there is an indicator for the charger/PC connector, accompanied by the strap hole.

Once the phone is open, in the upper part we see the 2.2” TFT display. It has a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels, and it supports 262k colors. The navigational buttons and the keyboard are below it. The first ones resemble the shape of the external touch keys.

The buttons of the keyboard are also round, fitting the design of the rest. However, we think that they give the phone a kind of retro spirit since they remind us of a rotary phone.

Display

The primary display of Sony Ericsson W980 is a 2.2" TFT unit of QVGA resolution and 262K colors. It is not quite what you would expect in a top-of-the-range phone in terms of size, but picture quality makes up for that. The secondary screen is also capable of showing up to 262K colors but has the modest resolution of 176 x 176 pixels.

The Sony Ericsson W980 primary display has commendable contrast and brightness levels. In addition, the long standing sunlight legibility issue with some of the Sony Ericsson handsets is at least partially resolved. With the W980 the display might not be perfectly visible in every position, but there are enough angles for problem-free working with the device.

We are not as pleased however with the external display. The shiny surface severely reduces sunlight legibility. Even indoors, its picture quality isn't as impressive. On the other hand, that's an issue with most external displays, so Sony Ericsson W980 is not to be judged so harshly.

Keypad 

We are rather pleased with the alphanumeric part of the keypad of Sony Ericsson W980. The keys are comfortably sized and there is more than enough space between them so you can hardly make a typo. The press feedback and touch orientation are also quite good. We are happy with the typing skills of Sony Ericsson W980.

What we don't like is the six keys around the D-pad. Those are way too tiny and very hard to use, especially if you have larger fingers. Other than that, we have little complains. Even the touch-sensitive keys on the front panel are nice to use. We still prefer the regular press keys but those somehow managed to avoid getting on our nerves.

The backlighting of Sony Ericsson W980 is strong enough but slightly uneven. Still it is good enough for making the phone perfectly usable in the dark. Furthermore, the light effects look all the more cooler in such conditions making the handset a real eye-catcher.

User interface

A high-end phone, it is no wonder Sony Ericsson W980 has the most advanced version of the user interface of the house. The UI has the typical Sony Ericsson feature phone styling, and offers an extensive set of options and settings.

The standby screen of Sony Ericsson W980 has pretty standard looks. It shows the pre-selected wallpaper and the typical status info in the top bar. That includes signal strength, battery status, the type of currently used data transfer method (3G, EDGE, GPRS) and the icon of the currently active profile (none if General is selected). Beneath the top bar are the operator logo, the clock and date. The bottom bar is reserved for the descriptions of the functions assigned to the confirming center of the D-pad key and the two soft keys.

There are four options for the main menu layout of Sony Ericsson W980. In addition to the traditional 4 x 3 grid, the main menu now has a couple of alternative views: rotating and single icon. The last option is to use the layout of the currently selected Flash Lite theme.

There is nice icon animation, which is most obvious when one of the standard Sony Ericsson themes is applied. When you select an icon it smoothly pops up on the display for a moment before you see the next screen. Besides, there are a number of animated transition effects throughout the interface plus some eye-candy reflections. Sony Ericsson W980 features the well-known Activity menu, which is a really handy, especially for a feature phone. It offers quick access to a number of selected functions. In addition, the Running Apps tab takes care of multi-tasking.

With Sony Ericsson W980 you can even minimize the status window when you receive files via Bluetooth and restore it through the Running Apps tab. However, this is not the case when you are sending content via Bluetooth. The other features of the Activity menu are quick access to recent events, web menu and the My Shortcuts tab, which is a user-configurable list of favorite features.

As most previous models, Sony Ericsson W980 comes with a dedicated Flight mode. It switches all transceivers off but, unluckily, requires a reboot. The other problem with the flight mode is that it can only work with a SIM card inserted, unlike some of the handsets offered by competing brands.

In general the user interface of Sony Ericsson W980 is really snappy with no lagging or holdups anywhere. We wouldn't have expected any different in a high-rated device anyway.

Multimedia

The Media menu, containing Photo, Music, Video and Settings, has the flash interface we already know. The new thing here, is that it also gives you access to Web Feeds, unlike W890 – from messages.

The Walkman player is the latest third version as well. You can switch between portrait or landscape view, by only turning the phone in the direction desired, and the accelerometer will take care of the rest. Thanks to it, you have the ShakeMe function. Holding the “Walkman” button and shaking the phone, you can switch the tracks playing.

Interestingly, even though it is version 3.0, same as in W890, there is a slight change in the interface. It fits the image of the equalizer, which now visualizes the factory presets in a very attractive manner, resembling a picture slideshow. Unfortunately, you can add only one personalized preset.

The new entry offers a built-in FM radio with RDS, but we were disappointed that it cannot be used without the earphones as previously announced. Its interface is simple and very easy to use.

The built-in FM Transmitter got us most exited, because that’s the first Sony Ericsson phone to offer such a function. It works very good and can be very useful if you want to share your music, by only using an FM tuner, nowadays, present almost everywhere we go.

Phonebook

The phonebook of Sony Ericsson W980 has a capacity of 1000 entries with a total of 7000 phone number fields. You can opt for either the SIM contacts or the phone contacts to be default for the phonebook. Displaying both lists simultaneously is impossible but a nice option allows you to auto save to SIM any new contacts that you're saving in the phone memory.

With Sony Ericsson W980 you can choose whether to order your contacts by first or by last name. Naturally, you can search by gradual typing of the desired name.

When adding a new contact, the available details are stored in five different tabs. The first tab offers 7 phone number fields, while the second tab is for email and web addresses. The third is for assigning a picture, custom ringtone, custom message tone (now that's a new one) and a voice command. The fourth goes for postal details. The last, fifth tab, is for making an additional note and adding a birth date.

A nice feature of Sony Ericsson W980 allows you to add each birthday you enter to the calendar and set a reminder with a single click.

Connectivity: all but Wi-Fi

Sony Ericsson W980 supports virtually every kind of network connection that you need. HSDPA, UMTS, EDGE are all on board. That means that you can have as quick network-based internet access as your carrier can offer.

As far as close-range connectivity is concerned the Sony Ericsson W980 supports USB and Bluetooth, both v2.0. Bluetooth also comes with A2DP support, so you can enjoy your favorite tracks on a set of stereo Bluetooth headphones. Furthermore, the phone could be used as a Bluetooth modem for accessing the Internet on a PC or notebook computer.

There are two things we are missing in the connectivity options of the Sony Ericsson W980. While the Wi-Fi is still a rarity among feature phones, a memory card slot doesn't seem like that much to ask. Yeah, we know that the phone has 8GB of internal memory, but we're talking connectivity options here, not storage.

Our tests with Sony Ericsson W980 showed write speeds of about 1800 KB/s. When reading the data from it, it gets as high as 2500 KB/s. While those numbers might sound sweet to some, they are not up to what a card reader can achieve. On the other hand, they are one of the best among the 8GB phones we have tested. For example we could only achieve 730 KB/s upload and 840 KB/s download speed with a Nokia N95 8GB we had laying around our office.

Web browsing

Sony Ericsson W980 uses the latest 3.4 Access NetFront HTML browser. It's similar to the web-oriented Sony Ericsson K660 and G502 we recently reviewed.

Elaborate web pages are rendered brilliantly and can be displayed in both portrait and landscape mode. Fullscreen is also available and so are different zoom levels. Panning/scrolling speed is quite up to standard. Screen auto-rotation is seamless too, thanks to the built-in accelerometer.

The web browser offers a virtual mouse pointer, which is a real pleasure to work with. Another interesting and practical feature is the "Find on page" option. It searches the loaded web page contents and the first match is immediately listed as soon as you type a letter, much like the desktop Mozilla Firefox browser for example.

Conclusion

As time has come for us to part with Sony Ericsson W980, we are left with quite positive impressions. The latest Walkman clamshell has a really nice feature-pack and great user interface to back it up. The camera functionality was the only serious disappointment - the lack of auto focus and the ridiculous camera interface are anything but appropriate for a high-end such as this one.

However the Sony Ericsson W980 manages to flaunt a number of unique extras that make it stand out. The piano black front, light effects and the FM transmitter are not something to find on every other phone out there. Identity is getting more and more crucial in the overcrowded mobile market. That alone is enough for a well deserved pat on the back for Sony Ericsson W980.

The only reason for a cool-off is the lack of information about the expected price of Sony Ericsson W980. We can't help anticipating a rather hefty price tag on the new Walkman flagship. This might just be enough to throw it in the pool with some big sharks and we are not quite sure if the W980 will make it there. We do like it enough though to hope it proves us wrong.