Sony Ericsson W995 review: 8MP Cyber-shot Walkman
Sony Ericsson’s W995 goes the extra media mile, 8MP camera and stunning music playback
On the outside it sports a thin slider design in progressive black, cosmic silver, or energetic red. Its front face is dominated by a 2.6-inch display, which should lend itself well to watching everything from music videos to movies. You’ll also find a desk stand (very nice!) and stereo speakers.
And just to prove that miracles do happen, Sony Ericsson broke down and included a 3.5mm headset jack. We’re not sure what made the company change its mind, but we couldn’t care less.
The W995’s Walkman player offers the standard range of features, including album art, shake control, TrackID, and an adjustable bass level. You’ll also be able to save MP3 and AAC files as ring tones. The 8.1-megapixel camera is straight out of a Cyber-shot line. It has a 16x digital zoom, auto-focus, face detection, a flash, image stabilization, Sony’s PictBridge, a video recorder, and picture blogging.
Finishing out the feature set are stereo Bluetooth, assisted-GPS with support for Google Maps, Wi-Fi, messaging and e-mail, a voice recorder, an FM radio, phone-as-modem capability, USB mass storage, PC syncing, instant messaging, organizer applications, a speakerphone, gaming, and direct access to YouTube.
With so much under the hood, it’s imperative Sony Ericsson backs it all up with solid battery life and memory. Fortunately, the W995’s specs look promising. Its Memory Stick Micro slot will accommodate cards up to 8GB, the internal memory is 118MB, and Sony Ericsson promises that the W995’s battery life will be long enough to support two full-length films (9 hours talk time, 20 hours music time and 5 hours video time).
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A tipster tells us that the device you’re looking at here is Sony Ericsson’s codename “Vulcan” — better known as the X2 — which would presumably replace the X1 at some point in the next few days, weeks, months, or years. Though the picture’s small, you can clearly make out the X Panel button in the lower left of the phone’s front and a Windows key in the upper left of the keyboard, which adds a dose of credibility — the company has, after all, put quite a bit of time and effort into pimping its panel interface SDK, and right now, the X1 is the only device that supports it. The image looks a little rough around the edges, but we can easily chalk that up to this being either a composite mockup or a very early prototype combined with the fact that our tipster seems to have blanked out the surroundings to protect the source. We’re not saying it’s definitely real, but this certainly looks plausible — we’re just not convinced yet that it looks better than the model it’d replace
