Last year was not very successful for Sony Ericsson and the company has suffered some significant loss, but it seems that this hasn’t been an obstacle for its progress, since it has announced the world’s first 12-megapixel phone, the Idou, back at the MWC 2009. Along with it, the manufacturer has also showcased some other models, which seem to have remained in Idou’s shadow. One of those devices was the slider W995, which we saw only for a while. Now, we have the opportunity to take a closer look at it, but still, we cannot make a full review, since the final unit has not yet been released. We will use a prototype unit (which is running with Vodafone software), so we will not give final opinions, as some changes may occur by the time of its official release.

Design 

What’s interesting about the Sony Ericsson W995 is that in spite of the “W” in its name, it isn’t promoted only as a very good music phone. Its video capabilities and 8.1-megapixel camera with autofocus and “photo flash” are also stressed on. While reading that last sentence, you have probably thought that this is definitely a high-end phone, which looks more like an all-in-one device than just a music phone. We think the same, because in addition to the features mentioned above, it also has Wi-Fi, GPS and a 3.5mm jack (at last), which has been missing even in the Walkman series phones until now. The jack is positioned on the top side, along with one of the two stereo speakers. The other one is on the bottom.

For the first time in a Sony Ericsson phone, there is a metal stand on the back of the device. It will allow you to place it on a table (by you half-opening it), similarly to the N96/N86 8MP, or you can just attach a neck strap to it (there might be one in the package?). What’s interesting here is that when the stand is closed, a small magnet keeps it firmly to the back side. This way, even if its mechanism gets a bit worn out, it would not move freely.

The W995 is really compact in size and its weight is acceptable for a phone with such functionality and metal front and back panels. On the front, there is a 2.6-inch display with QVGA resolution and 262k colors, which is able to deliver a really nice image quality and we hope this will stay the same in the final unit. The keys, including those of the keypad, are big enough for people with thicker fingers. What’s cool here is that when you start the Walkman player, the keys that control it change their backlight, and the rest are not illuminated. The three music-dedicated keys on the right side also light up in orange. Below them are also the volume rocker and the camera shutter.

User interface

The Sony Ericsson W995 has the highest model number of any Sony Ericsson phone (beating the P990 by a whisker). Well, that says it all - we're dealing with a high-end handset here. The interface is customizable by Flash Lite themes and is sprinkled with smooth animations all over. The interface offers many options and settings accessible at great speed - adding to an uncompromising user experience.

The standby screen is arranged as usual with signal strength, currently used data carrier and battery status indicated at the top. At the bottom of the display just above the context keys are their labels. This leaves plenty of space for the elaborate background animations.

Sony Ericsson handsets also come with a handy option for their wallpaper - you can use an application as a background instead of an actual image. Of course you cannot use any application out there - the choice is currently limited to only three apps. These are WalkMate, Sound Sensor and Rock Bobblehead. The step counting WalkMate is probably the only practical app among them.

The options for the menu layout are the well-known foursome - one theme-dependent, a 3 x 4 grid of icons, rotating view and single icon view. Rotating view features three animated front icons on the display, the center one showing the active selection. The other two icons are half-hidden, there to simply indicate what comes next. Five other menu icons can be seen in the dim background.

The icon view displays a single icon at a time and a vertical bar, which features tiny icons for the other main menu entries. Neither of those view modes work with shortcut keys, it's only the Grid view that allows quick numeric keypad access.

But there's another reason to favor the good old grid view over the new gimmicks. The W995 features a couple of new themes we see for the first time. They affect the main menu causing the currently selected icon to break up and then pull back together in one of the best animations we've seen.

Phonebook

The phonebook has space for 1000 entries with 20 fields each. You can choose to view contacts in the phone memory or on SIM, but not both. Either way you can set up the phone to auto save to SIM all contacts that are being saved to the phone memory. You can also back up your contacts list on the memory card and restore it from there.

Editing a contact uses the tabbed interface found throughout the phone. There are five tabs that group related contact details. The first tab is for names and numbers, next up is web addresses such as e-mails and URLs. The third tab is for storing a picture, a custom ringtone, group, message tone and voice command, the fourth is for postal details and finally the fifth has fields for a note and a birthday (which you are prompted to add to the Calendar too).

The name of a contact is filled in a single field, but you still have the option to order contacts by first or last name. The phone guesses which is which and does quite well at that, so even a "John von Smith" won't fool it. Naturally, you can search by gradual typing.

Walkman

The Sony Ericsson W995 features the Walkman 4.0 player with all possible extras included and then some. One major addition to version 4.0 is skinning support. The other feature that audiophiles will really appreciate is the 3.5 mm audio jack - a first for the Sony Ericsson Walkman lineup and only second to XPERIA.

Accessed from the sleek Media menu or the dedicated Walkman key, the player supports a vast collection of file formats and has several equalizer presets. In addition, you also get Album art and the proprietary Sony Ericsson Shake control making use of the phone's built-in accelerometer. The accelerometer is also put to use for automatic rotation of the display.

Naturally the music player also offers step-by-step filtering of the tracks you want to hear. The D-pad is in charge of music controls and also brings up a list of all the tracks in the current playlist or album.

As we already mentioned, the keys on the side of W995 are a nice set of alternative music controls - they glow so that they're easy to find in the dark and work even with the keypad locked. No worries about accidental presses though: the keys are not raised too much but still easy to press with a finger.

The "Now playing" screen is simple but offers all the needed controls and information. The D-pad offers playback controls with their functions shown at the bottom of the screen. Above them is the current track info such as album art, running time, track name, performer and album.

Instead of album art you can opt for visualizations, but since they occupy the same small space as the album art, don't expect a great light show. You'd be better off minimizing the player and enjoying the animations on the home screen during playback. These depend on the currently selected Flash Lite theme so they blend in perfectly with it.

The other music-related Walkman goodie, SensMe, is a different approach to populating a playlist. Instead of choosing genre or performer, you are presented with a coordinate system. The vertical axis is the tempo - fast to slow, and the horizontal axis is the mood - sad to happy. Songs are shown as dots placed accordingly and you use a circle to select the one fitting your mood best. You can of course modify the radius of the circle and repeat this several times for any playlist.

As cool as that sounds it does have one inconvenience - the songs must be tagged by the Sony Ericsson Media Manager software. To do this you use the manager to transfer the songs with the SensMe analysis option enabled. Tagging songs by hand is not possible so you need to choose between analyzing the songs with the Media Manager, which takes a while, or do without SensMe until you have more time to transfer the songs properly.

Camera

The 8 megapixel power of the W995 is harnessed in the friendly and efficient camera interface which we've known - and appreciated - across a number of high-end Cyber-shot handsets such as the C905. While the handling and features are quite familiar, the camera quality is not what we expected - no, a Walkman is not a Cyber-shot. The picture quality of the W995 snapper is just adequate, while on the C905 it's exceptional. Bear in mind though that this is a pre-release unit and the final quality may differ from our test shots.

The 8 MP AF camera on the W995 offers a wide range of features like face detection, camera images geotagging, exposure metering, image and video stabilizer, BestPic, auto-rotation, macro mode, etc. The W995 camera interface lacks any option for setting the ISO levels, something that was also missing on the Cyber-shot flagship, the C905.

The W995 is capable of a maximum image resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels with an average file size of about 2 MB. The lens is not protected, but there is a PowerLED flash to assist in short-range shooting.

There are no surprises in the latest Cyber-shot interface. Settings on a toolbar with pop-up submenus and the Multi Menu have become well known since the K850 and do help the overall user experience. The two photo keys over the display and the D-pad in camera mode give access to the most frequently used camera settings like focus mode, exposure, flash control, and self-timer. Traditionally, the viewfinder toolbar lets you control shoot mode, scenes, picture size, focus mode, flash, self-timer, exposure metering, white balance, effects, and additional settings.

The ultra quick-snapping BestPic mode has two varieties - fast and slow. In fast mode it produces 7 full-size 8 megapixel images at intervals of about 0.8 sec, while in slow mode it takes 7 images again but at a longer interval of about 1.7 sec. Sadly, the flash is unusable in either of the two modes.

With a built-in GPS receiver, the Sony Ericsson W995 is capable of putting standard GPS coordinates in images. You can enable geotagging (Add position) from the settings to add GPS location data to your pictures. A flag icon at the bottom of the viewfinder indicates that the option is activated. A satellite icon in the top left corner shows that the phone is attempting to get a GPS lock.

The proper geo-tagging of images requires some time for the GPS to lock position. The successful lock is depicted by a set of green stripes in the upper right corner of the camera viewfinder (right next to the satellite icon). You can, of course, speed up the process by enabling the Assisted-GPS function, but this generates extra data traffic on your account so bear that in mind. When browsing tagged images in the gallery, the View on map option displays the place where the picture was taken directly on the preinstalled Google Maps.

The Sony Ericsson W995 has a Power LED flash, which is also used as a focus assist beam. The flash is pretty bright and surprisingly effective in dark conditions. Of course, nothing can really compare to a xenon flash, but it still does a nice job and can be used for video recording.

The one shortcoming we found with the W995 concerns the one-way menu layout - to get to the Extra settings you have to go through all the other settings on the toolbar as it's the last item there. Looped browsing of items on the toolbar should have been possible, as with the camera interfaces of competing brands. This problem persists in W902, C905 and other previous Sony Ericsson phones.

So what's up with the picture quality? Unlike the 8 megapixel Cyber-shot C905 - whose photos astonished us - the W995 suffers a similar problem to all other Walkman phones: the pictures are noisy and oversharpened, and the lively colors and contrast are gone. Another old friend makes an appearance here too - the purple fringing on the edge of buildings. Even the picture detail is less than on the C905.

But, hey, don't get too gloomy over this - the overall impression is good. The W995 camera catches the moment just as any Cyber-shot does. It has almost all of its features and the photo quality is reasonably satisfying. There is certainly work to be done on the image processing algorithm and we really hope this will happen before the phone is out on the market.

Of course, the W995 is also capable of capturing video, which according to a Sony Ericsson rep over at the MWC 2009 should go to WQVGA resolution at 30fps - not really impressive but still a progress. Unfortunately, our pre-release unit, was only able to record video in QVGA resolution at 30fps. The clips are recorded in MPEG4 format and take about 6 MB for every minute of recording.

Conclusion

Sony Ericsson W995 is the company's top-ranking Walkman and its spec sheet is clearly set to justify this label. The Flash-based user interface, which we've praised repeatedly, seems to be only getting better. There are no gaps in the connectivity set and the 3.5 mm audio jack is a long-awaited blessing.

Sony Ericsson W995 not only spares users the agonizing choice between Walkman and Cyber-shot. It has simply harvested all the high-end goodies and leaves nothing else to want. And all that skill is packed in a compact, solid and stylish body.

Now, it's not hard to believe it was all too easy for Sony Ericsson to get carried away. Amid the first ever and best ever hype they somehow overlooked video. Just like Sony Ericsson by the way, and it wouldn't have been a big deal if they didn't make a big deal of it themselves. Why bother put a kickstand when the commitment to great video was never taken seriously? No kickstand can make up for the lack of codec support, inadequate screen resolution and no widescreen aspect ratio.

And still, the poor video is the only major grudge with W995. We just hope it doesn't need to be reminded that the devil's in the details. In all fairness, video should not be make or break for the majority of users, especially when all the rest is up to scratch. It's just that Sony Ericsson W995 will be held to a higher standard. It can't help it, just like it can't help the heavy smartphone fire on the high end of premium all-in-ones.