Overview:
The Sony Ericsson W-for-Walkman range has a new member that is being hailed as the mother of all W-Series phones. On the surface, it pack a feature punch with a high-end camera, loads of music options and Sony Ericsson have even provided a standard 3.5mm jack so you can use any headphones to listen to Madonna. But does all of this convergence work in this petite package? Let’s find out.
Review:
We got our hands on a W995 the other day, and first things first, we had to look at the design. Now if I’m honest, the Sony Ericsson W-Series design team have been taking it easy. Upon first glance at this phone, it looks remarkably like a W595, W910i, W850i… in short, it’s yet another variation on the Walkman theme.
It would be great to see the likes of a touchscreen on a Walkman phone, but it looks like we’re going to have to wait for the privilege.
Having gotten that rant out of the way, we can get a bit more in-depth into the phone, which offers much more of an imaginative story.
The W995 is the first SE handset to feature Media Go which transfers and automatically syncs your phone’s music library and podcasts from your computer. Media Go will also be a mum and organise all of your files on your phone.
As expected from a top of the range Walkman phone, the W955 comes with a range of music features such as SenseMe, which will sort your music by mood or tempo for when you just can’t choose which CD to listen to right now.
It also has shake control, which allows you to shuffle through songs and make a selection all with a flick of your wrist. There is also album art, TrackID and an FM radio as well as support for both MP3 and AAC files.
Music playback on this phone is great, as you would expect from a Walkman. There is solid differentiation between treble, mid-range and bass, and there’s the ability to adjust the bass level depending on what genre of muic you’re into.
What the W995 also has to set it apart from the rest of the W-crowd is a whopping 8.1 megapixel camera, challenging Sony Ericsson’s own Cybershot C-series mobiles. It particularly stands up against the C905 which offers the same megapixels, but has a xenon flash to the W995’s LED.
The high-end camera on the W995 features a 16x digital zoom, image stabilisation, auto-focus, face detection, Sony’s PictBridge, and picture blogging. Thanks to a built-in GPS receiver, it also supports Geotagging.
This all sounds well and good, but what is it all like in practice? In a word, excellent.
The photographs from this phone are clear with well defined edges, and even while I tried to wobble around on purpose, the images looked like I was making use of a tripod, albeit at a 45 degree angle.
The W995 also comes with some basic picture editing abilities such as red-eye removal, which is perfect for a series of drunken pub shots.
It will also record video and does a pretty good job of it, handling action scenes (someone running across the office after I yell out that the vending machine is almost empty) without much blurring.
With all of this media capability, you’re going to need quite a bit of memory and Sony Ericsson have kindly included an 8GB M2 memory card so you don’t need to keep deleting your holiday snaps. The phone also comes with 118MB of internal memory.
Back to the basic design of the phone, perhaps I was a little harsh at the start by suggesting that this phone hadn’t evolved very much as there is one feature that is causing quite a stir- a standard 3.5mm headphone jack.
This means that instead of being tied down to a Sony Ericsson proprietary connector, you can use your Sennheisers or Grados to listen to your music which is welcome news for any audiophile. 
The W995 also has its own little kickstand which can be used in portrait or landscape style. It’s a great idea for when you’re trying to show a video to friends, and I would say that it makes it easy on the eyes when watching a full-length movie on its 2.6 inch screen- the largest screen yet to grace the W-Series.
The overall build quality of the phone is solid and does look good with its brush metal surface. The W995 will come in progressive black, cosmic silver and energetic red, though how progressive black differs from “the kind of black you’d find in the bottom of a well” black is beyond me. Still though, it’s nice to have the colour options.
Overall, the W995 is a big step up in the Walkman series and is a top quality all-in-one phone that is worth getting excited about.
The Gaj-It Verdict:
Design: 7/10
Usability: 8/10
Features: 9/10
Value: 9/10
We Say:
The W995 packs a huge punch in terms of features and is the best all-rounder phone Sony Ericsson has produced to date. It aims to give you everything you need in its phone functions, camera functions and music functions, and has seriously raised the bar for a high-end, all rounder device.