Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 10 March 2008 16:21
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
Like other SE Walkman phones of late, the SE W890i comes with what are now standard features. First up is the latest Walkman 3.0 software, which promises ‘one-click’ access to the music player, and simple navigation to your favourite tracks.
As you’d expect of any modern digital music player, you can “organise your music collection by artist, album, or even visually, by using Album Art on the W890i”, while using ‘SensMe’ technology to let your mood program what tracks play next.
Besides the now standard FM radio, Sony Ericsson’s cool ‘TrackID’ service is also built-in, letting you record a few seconds of a song playing on the radio, which can be uploaded to the TrackID service. It then analyses the song, tells you what it is, and if memory serves, offers to sell it to you through Sony’s PlayNow online service.
The 2GB M2 Memory Stick Micro is naturally removable, letting you buy as many as you want to expand your music collection, although you’ll need to be careful not to lose your additional cards, they are smaller than your thumbnail.
2GB is enough to store up to 1800 tracks using what is likely to be eAAC+ compression – if you use regular MP3 tracks you’ll probably only be able to store around 500 songs at 128kbps, and fewer if you use a 192kbps or better bitrate to encode those tracks – although that’s something that affects any mobile music phone maker than quotes very high song numbers using AAC, eAAC+ or other codecs.
Happily, the W890i has been upgraded with an HSDPA chipset, letting you access the 3.5G network that many telco operators worldwide are now deploying. This means your phone can download songs very quickly, and should load web pages ‘up to four times faster’ than previous 3G only models.
Just as with the previous W880i model, there’s ‘stereo speakers’ built into the W890i for ‘awesome sound’, but the sound will always be a lot more awesome when plugged into much larger speakers or heard through the included headphones. As you’d firmly expect of any modern phone, Bluetooth capabilities are built in, and presumably as with other modern SE Walkman phones, it will be A2DP compatible.
So, what else is included, and how much does it cost? Please read onto page 3.
