Another Walkman

Another day, another Walkman phone. But has the latest W660i 3G music phone got anything in its design and feature locker to make you sit up and take notice? 3G finds out.

3G is incredibly fond of Sony Ericsson’s Walkman phone range, so we’re always thrilled to get our mitts on the manufacturer’s latest music handset. But lately the excitement has gone a tad flat. If you exclude the higher-end 8GB W960i and the HSDPA shake-control W910i slider, the recent additions to the Walkman clan have just been a case of refreshing previous handsets.

We reviewed the W610i, a phone we very much liked, but essentially it was just a W810i with a mild facelift. Similarly, the phone gracing our pockets right now, the 3G-enabled W660i, appears to be the W850i slider melted into candybar form or even a pumped-up W880i. Although, with 25 to 30 million Walkman phones sold worldwide, perhaps we shouldn’t blame Sony Ericsson for not wanting to stray from a successful formula with the W660i music handset.

Designer Walkman

To put a spin on an otherwise familiar-looking handset, Sony Ericsson is billing the W660i as a ‘designer’ Walkman phone. Where the W880i broke the mould with its incredibly gossamer 9.4mm profile, the W660i sadly returns to the well-worn signature candybar format.

However, it’s still quite trim at 14.5mm, is well constructed, handles beautifully and Sony Ericsson has introduced two coloured models to jazz up proceedings and appeal to a male and female audience. The Record Black model rocks up with a gold trim and a subtle circular pattern that mimics the grooves on a vinyl record. The ladies model breaks the Walkman black/white/silver tradition and comes sprayed in a Rose Red veneer with an etched floral motif on the rear. These flourishes are obviously what give the W660i its designer tag.

Nice and easy

Sony Ericsson has abandoned the tiny lozenge-shaped buttons recently introduced on the W880i and W610i and returned to a standard keypad arrangement. The buttons are nicely sized with a soft rubber texture and are primed for speed texting. The navigation pad and soft keys follow the same design as the likes of the W610i, W810i and W880i, with the pad doubling as the player’s controls when in music mode. A dedicated Walkman player button and an Activity Menu button allow you to easily access shortcuts, the internet, running apps and your appointments.

Walkman phones, and Sony Ericsson handsets in general, are always lucid to use and the W660i doesn’t differ one jot in the user-friendly stakes from past Walkman handsets. One disappointment is the resolution of the display. We assumed it would be QVGA quality (240x320 pixels) like the W850i and W880i, but it only stretches to 176x220 pixels. It’s not a massive gripe, but to the keener eye, you can tell it lacks detail.

Turn on the music

The W660i settles for the second version of the Walkman music player and you can fire it up via the dedicated Walkman button or via the main menu. The graphic user interface is slick with sub-menus connected via family tree-type links and these neatly slide into view when selected. Your stored music is sorted and accessed via the artist name, album title, by individual track and your playlists (these can be created on the fly).

Transferring your CD collection or existing digital library (it supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+ and WMA formats) is carried out through Sony Ericsson’s proprietary Disc2Phone desktop software. It remains iTunes-intuitive and easy to get to grips with and you can simply hook up the phone to your PC via the supplied USB cable.

The W660i also arrives with a bundled 512MB MemoryStick Micro which, providing you don’t share the space with other multimedia clobber, can store around 125 MP3 tracks encoded at 128Kbps. This means if you want the W660i to be your primary music player, you will have to invest in a 4GB card to make it worthwhile.

Heads up

The Walkman player doesn’t just impress us with its ease of use, but its audio style is pretty decent too. As supplied headphones go, the in-ear bud headphones are cracking quality and you even get a 3.5mm headphone jack adapter to plug in your quality cans if Sony Ericsson’s aren’t to your tastes.

Better still, we hooked up a pair of MOTOROKR S9 Bluetooth headphones for a wireless workout and experienced a lively sound, especially with the five-mode equaliser set to Mega Bass. Elsewhere in the music department, the W660i has a built-in FM radio and Sony Ericsson’s proprietary music recognition software, TrackID, that can identify unknown songs simply by holding the phone up to the music source.

Along with the W660i’s screen resolution, the two-megapixel camera has to be the most disappointing aspect of this Walkman phone. Sony Ericsson has retained the basic lens from the W850i, so this means no macro or auto-focus, and there’s not even room for an LED flash. Because the snapper is basic, the picture quality can be quite pasty at times.

In our review of the W610i, 3G suggested that perhaps Sony Ericsson was getting a tad predictable with its mid-level Walkman phones and the W660i confirms this assumption. Despite its design being a little more stylish than fellow Walkman candybars, we’re still struggling to get really enlivened by this latest music phone. However, we can’t deny the W660i is another accomplished Walkman phone. Still, Sony Ericsson still needs to spruce things up a little further to keep this mid-tier Walkman phone range fresh.