Sony Ericsson W902 Review

The Sony Ericsson W902 is the newest release by Sony Ericsson in the Walkman “W” series of music minded phones. It features a standard design, nothing very stylish and flashy and a nice set of features. It is slim, sleek and has nice build quality, it should appeal to the new music loving generation. Lately Nokia has been rolling out many music oriented mobile phones, most of which are beating the Sony Ericsson phones on their home turf – Music. To counter them, Sony Ericsson has launched the new Sony Ericsson W902 – which combines multimedia functions with a 5 MP camera, blurring the line between its Cybershot and Walkman ranges. With Nokia’s new touchscreen 5800 Xpress Music launching soon, Sony Ericsson needs a hit soon in their hands and the W902 might give them just that.

Sony Ericsson W902 Specs:

• Dimensions: 110 x 49 x 11.7 mm
• Weight: 99.8 gms
• Display: 2.2 inch TFT, 240 x 320 pixels, 256K colors
• Memory: 32 MB internal memory, 8 GB Memory Stick Micro M2 card
• Camera: 5 MP Camera (2592 x 1944 pixels) with autofocus, flash, Video recording (QVGA 30 FPS), Secondary Videocall camera
• Connectivity: GPRS class 10, HSCSD, EDGE class 10, 3G HSDPA, USB v2.0
• Bluetooth: Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP
• Battery: Standard Li ion battery, 930 mAh, Rated standby time- 380 hrs
• Other Features: Java MIDP 2.0, Walkman player, FM radio with RDS, Geo-tagging, TrackID music recognition, Shake control

Design and Build Quality:

The Sony Ericsson W902 has a slim candybar formfactor with a simple design. There is nothing flashy in the design, but it will still appeal to some people, like me. It is available in Black and Red color schemes as of now. With dimensions of 110 x 49 x 11.7 mm, it is rather slim and very portable and it weighs just slightly less than 100 gms. The weight and dimensions are in line with similarly positioned handsets. The build quality is nice and the handset feels sturdy and durable. The body of the W902 exudes a rugged feel and it should easily last a couple of years.

The front face of the phone sports the display, the keypad just below it and a secondary cam and ambient light sensor above it. The fast port slot is nested on the left side, while the right side sports the volume rocker, music controls and the dedicated camera button. The Walkman button is located on the top of the phone.

Display and Keypad:

The Sony Ericsson W902 sports a 2.2 inch TFT display, with a native resolution of 240 x 320 pixels and supports a max of 256K colors. The display is no different from other Sony Ericsson displays. While it has nice brightness and contrast levels and good sunlight legibility, it cannot match the new N85′s superb OLED display. It is way smaller than the Nokia 5800′s 3.2 inch display. We would have preferred atleast a 2.4 inch display. The sunlight legibility is nice and the display quality crisp and clear.

Below the display lies a standard keypad with adequately sized buttons and a round Navigational button. The keypad doesn’t feel cramped at all and the buttons offer nice feedback. The keys are nicely backlit.

Multimedia:

The Sony Ericsson is primarily a music “Walkman” phone and comes bundled with Walkman 3.0. The Walkman 3.0 comes with a few enhancements, mostly visual. It features a few nice features like SensMe – a type of automatic visual playlist creation and Shake COntrol – used to change tracks. The Walkman 3.0 supports both the MSC and MTP protocols and can play a wide range of formats – MP3, AAC, AAC+, E-AAC+, WAV, WMA and M4A. You can sort tracks according to Artists, Albums, Tracks, Genre and Playlists. It also sports the TrackID feature to identify and download tracks. It also has a custom EQ.

The sound quality is quite nice and lives up to the Walkman tradition. The phone has loud speakers and comes with the HPM 77 wired headset which offer very good sound quality. It is one of the best bundled music headsets. You can also minimise the media player and hence do some form of multitasking by running some apps together. Even in this case, the similarly priced Nokia N79 and the Motorola ZN5 outperform the W902 by a small margin.

It also has a FM radio with RDS to view additional information over a data network. The FM reception is quite nice.

Camera:

The Sony Ericsson W902 sports a 5 MP camera which shoots pictures at a maximum resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels. It has autofocus and comes with a LED flash. It supports video recording at a 30 FPS in the QVGA resolution, which is a downer as most 5 MP phones record VGA video at 30 FPS. It also sports a secondary camera in the front which is primarily only for video calls. The camera interface is nice and offers a lot of features. You can customize settings like the shutter sound, white balance, image effects, night mode etc.

The image quality is nice but it can’t compete with the superb cam of the Motorola ZN5, it’s flagship 5 MP camera phone. It fares slightly better than the Nokia N79 especially in night shots. The image quality of the W902 is detailed and is sharper with accurate color reproduction. It also supports Geo tagging but you have to enter the co ordinates manually.

Performance:

The Sony Ericsson is very fast and responsive with no lags or delays when it comes to opening interface menus or opening applications and games. The menu transitions are nice and slightly improved over earlier versions. Other than that, there is nothing much to speak of about the interface. It supports the Java MIDP 2.0 profile and is compatible with all Java applications and games.

Battery:

The Sony Ericsson W902 sports a 930 mAh Li ion battery – the BST 38 which has a rated standby time of 380 hrs and a rated talktime of 9 hrs. It should last for about 2 days easily with decent usage. The Camera, Music and Video playback drains the battery a lot faster. The battery life is quite good and as long as any other phone in this range.

Pros:

• Nice design and Build Quality
• Good Sound Quality
• Nice Camera

Cons:

• No Wi-Fi
• No GPS

Final Words:

The Sony Ericsson W902 is a nice phone but the Nokia N79 and the Moto ZN5 prove to be much better in terms of features and sound and camera quality. The W902 lacks two major features – Wi-Fi and GPS and also lags behind the N79 and ZN5 in terms of software support. So while it is a good phone with nice features, we wouldn’t recommend getting the W902, especially when you can get relatively much better phones in the same price range.

Our Rating: 3.5 / 5.