Item: sony ericsson w900i
Well my W900i has arrived and its been one adventure from the minute I removed it from the box.
BT connections are nice and simple and fast, but not as fast as the supplied usb cable.
You get a wonderful BT mouse application, this allows you to use the phone as a BT mouse, and the keypad emulates cursor keys.
It has preset settings for desktop, media player, and presenter.
Selecting connect on the phone resulted in a lot of failed connections, trying to connect from the PC seemed fine, so that may
be a software issue, hopefully something to get fixed in later firmware or software.
I have tried both media playermode and desktop mode, both have issues....
The desktop mode is simple, the cursor pad moves the mouse, the numeric keys are mapped to keyboard cursor keys, and some
other buttons, task switch etc, its a very useful idea, but the tab switching is so fast you cant get the task you want! minor
niggle really.
In media player mode, pause and stopped worked, but search would not, neither would volume or mute..........
Odd thing in desktop mode the cursor keys worked media players skip, as you would expect cursor keys would, so I cant
understand why they dont work in media player mode.
I didnt try presenter mode....
Now to the main phone functions.
Build quality is to their usual standard, so I'm not knocking it....
Backlighting is good for indoors, but not so great outside, but slightly improved on the t610 I had before.
When you connect the USB cable it offers a menu to select file transfer mode, where it behaves like a flash memory
device, or in phone mode, where it works as a modem.
When connected via usb it also charges, but I cant confirm that in file transfer mode, it only seemed to charge for
me in phone mode, even though the screen showed charging in both modes.
When in file transfer mode, the phone does nothing else, and wont accept calls / sms etc.
Video capture is great.
Photo's are not superb, but are damn fine for a phone, I have put some on the web, unedited, and some compressed to
average jpeg size, no exposures/colours where changed.
It has a 'night light' for indoor use, and its more of a gimmick than a tool, but does illuminate near objects.
night mode is not that much better than normal, because normal is so much better than the old phones.
Call quality is as expected, but I think the phone gets warm too quick in extended calls.
sms is once again usual t610 k750 standard, but its a shame you cant do a 'quick reply' with a template (Yeah stop
messaging me I'l be home in 10) without spinning it open and starting to write a novel, a major omission in my book.
Rotation, emm, they should have made it go all the way round, it can only do 180, both directions, but its an
ergonomic thing, you kind of have to shut it the opposite way to what you open it, you get used to it.
Also if you press it too hard against your ear, it can shut...
Walkman mode, mp3 playback, no problem, sound has a few crackles on full volume, and its not a quite phone, with
the external speakers (now being bundled with some carriers) its truly amazing for a small device, its not megabass,
but its not missing anything either.
Video playback is faultless when encoded in a sensible size, ie xvid 320*240 a 15 fps, you can get a 30 minute show
(reality 25mins) in about 25mb, and fit a series on the phones internal memory!
You can put a 2gb small memory stick in it, I cant test that at the moment, I put the stick down and now cant find
it! (so damn small and black!)
I'm happy, it does the jobs it sets out to do and seems to lose nothing for being multifunction, even the gimmicky
BT mouse function can be overlooked as the most useful out of the three modes works fine.
Heres a test pic of a food packet placed between my feet, taken from sitting on a chair.
It was 360k, so I had to jpg it to get it to upload but its not lost alot
a few more at the url below for now, see if you can see my car hiding behind the tree...
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tinabriddon/w900i/
Linear Mode
