Sony-Ericsson W595 review: Music on the slide

Walkman rocks

The Sony Ericsson W595 features the Walkman 3.0 player with all possible extras included. Accessed from the very smart Media menu, 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, which makes 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.

The “Now playing” screen is simple but offers all the necessary controls and information. The D-pad offers playback control with their functions shown at the bottom of the screen. Above them is information on the current track such as album art, song duration, 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.

The animations on the home screen during playback make up for that though. They depend on the currently selected Flash Lite theme.

When you minimize the music player, the currently playing track, album and artist get displayed on the home screen with some nice graphics that perfectly blend with the screen if a Flash Lite theme is used.

Now playing screen • homescreen dances to the music

The equalizer offers only 5 presets (including “Normal”) but you can customize them. Luckily, the Mega Bass preset is also onboard.

Mega Bass is among the equalizer presets

Another highly promoted Walkman feature is Shake control. It allows you to change the currently running track and even shuffle your entire playlist with a simple flick of the hand.

All you need to do to use Shake control is press the Walkman key and shake the phone forward (for going one track forward) or backward (for going a track back). Both moves in quick succession does the shuffle trick.

You can also turn the volume up and down by gently tilting the handset while you hold the Walkman key pressed.

The other music-related Walkman goodie, SensMe, offers 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 a single playlist.

FM radio

The FM radio on the Sony Ericsson W595 supports RDS and TrackID. You can store up to 20 stations and use the auto save feature to scan and save stations automatically.

FM radio User Interface

The radio can be minimized to play in the background and controlled via the Walkman keys but, unlike the music player, it doesn’t have any visualization on the home screen, not even RDS info. The previous/next buttons can be used for tuning in – one short click for going 0.1 MHz up or down, and a longer press for switching between saved stations.

Video player

The video player on the Sony Ericsson W595 supports fast-forward, rewind, and slow-mo playback. It can play in landscape and has three options for video size – original, auto fit and full screen (which crops the video if needed).

The capable video player

A nice feature of the video player is the screenshot capability. It allows you to save a frame of video and add it to the gallery.

Camera is basic, but still shoots well

The Sony Ericsson W595 packs a 3.15-megapixel autofocus camera capable of taking shots at a maximum resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels (the average file size is a tad below 900 KB).

The W595 is a Walkman and, unlike the W902, imaging is very much secondary to the music features. Video recording is the same – QVGA resolution at 15 fps.

You still get a few niceties like auto-rotate, camera images geo-tagging (based on cell-ID), but BestPic, macro mode or stabilization are missing. The user interface has a typical Cyber-shot arrangement but with the extras left out.

Settings are displayed in the viewfinder on a toolbar with pop-up submenus. Traditionally, the viewfinder toolbar lets you control shoot mode, scenes, picture size, self-timer, white balance, effects, and settings (Multi menu).

The camera interface is a simplified Cyber-shot interface

The Sony Ericsson W595 doesn’t have GPS on-board but is capable of putting standard GPS coordinates in images based on cell tower triangulation. This seems to work reasonably accurately in dense city areas where cell towers are closely positioned, but this may vary in other scenarios.

When browsing tagged images in the gallery, you have access to a “View on map” tab from the options menu, which displays your location directly on the preinstalled Google Maps. If you pair the phone with an external Bluetooth GPS receiver, the geotagging feature automatically starts to use it to collect exact GPS coordinates for the images.

Thanks to the built-in accelerometer the camera is also able to auto-rotate your images when you are previewing them. The silent shooting mode completes the features list of the W595 camera.

The Sony Ericsson W595′s camera produces nice images with a fair level of detail and no purple fringing. We definitely see a nice improvement over the pre-release unit we had for previewing.

One of our concerns with the image quality is that the sharpening is a bit too much. It’s supposed to compensate for the aggressive noise reduction routine, which not only creates a water color effect over some areas (the foliage), but also eradicates detail in the shadows.

On the positive side however, the images look really nice and punchy straight out of the camera with no further editing.

Connectivity

The W595 offers the full range of connectivity options. Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and 3G are all on board, so there’s virtually no spot on earth where you won’t be able to get connected.

In addition, you’ve got the fastest data transfer around, provided that a HSDPA-enabled network is available. By the way, the compatible UMTS frequency is only 2100Mhz. Like the C902, the Sony Ericsson W595 will have localized versions (W595a for America and W595c for China) but only the W595 will have HSDPA support.

Besides the network-based connectivity, Sony Ericsson W595 offers the usual Bluetooth v2.0 and USB options. There is also support for the A2DP profile, allowing you to listen to music on a stereo Bluetooth headset.

Last but not least, there is also the M2 card slot which might just turn out to be one of the quickest means of transferring data on certain occasions.

The Sony Ericsson W595 supports local and remote synchronization of contacts and calendar events. The local one is with Outlook and a PC, while the remote synchronization works with remote servers.

The USB connectivity has four modes. The first one is File transfer, which is self-explanatory. Then comes the USB Internet in case you need to use the phone as a modem.

The third one is the Media transfer, which directly connects to Windows media player allows for synchronizing your WMP music and playlists with the phone. The last one is the PictBridge one, used for direct printing of images.

Final words

The Sony Ericsson W595 is clearly a mid-range product and a very capable music phone we might add. Of course, there is still a trade-off to be made when choosing between the Walkman or the Cyber-shot part of the Sony Ericsson portfolio and in this case it’s camera auto focus. But we are satisfied with the W595 image quality and have no grudge there.

Unfortunately, at a price point of 200 euro (250 US dollars), the W595 is heavily overpriced and its own siblings such as Sony Ericsson C902 and W760 are also its greatest rivals. And truth be told, the W595 can’t really fight back when those two are involved.

So looking forward to better times with more reasonable pricing, we part ways with the Sony Ericsson W595 left with nothing but positive impressions.

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