Sony Ericsson W395 Review

The Sony Ericsson W395 was first announced back in February this year and is part of the Walkman family. Is it a worthy music device though?

W395

What’s in the box:

• Handset
• Battery
• Charger
• USB Cable
• Headphones
• Manual/Warranty

Sony Ericsson W395 Specification:

• Dimensions – 96 x 47 x 14.9mm
• Weight – 96g
• Display TFT 256 colours
• Speakerphone with stereo speakers
• Internal Memory – 10mb
• External Memory – Memory stick micro, up to 4Gb
• GPRS
• Edge
• Bluetooth V2 with A2DP
• Camera – 2MP
• Video Recording
• SMS, EMS, MMS, Email, IM
• Browser – WAP/2.0 xHTML, HTML (openwave), RSS Reader
• Radio – Stereo FM with RDS
• Games
• Java
• Battery – Stand-by up to 480 hrs, Talk Time up to 8 hours.

General:

The top of the W395 contains only the memory card slot.

Top

On the left is just the Charging port.

Left Side

The right hand side houses the up/down volume rocker and also the camera key.

Right Side

The back of the device has only the camera as a feature but it also has some nice logos!

Back Side

The front of the device is where the action is at.

Front

Highlights:

• Easy to use
• Lightweight
• Flashing Purple Light!

Lowlights:

• No 3G/Wi-Fi
• Bad music sound Quality

Review:

To be honest I have never been a huge fan of Sony Ericssons but that doesn’t mean I wont give this device a honest review. The handset certainly feels nice in the hand, extremely lightweight and well balanced when in its open position. Build quality feels reasonable although the battery cover does feel a little flimsy.

The keys on the front of the device are nice and easy to use. They are evenly spaced making light work of finding the one you want without looking at the device. The centre key is surrounded by a D-Pad which has a nice purple light set behind it. Looks great in the dark!

As expected there are dedicated music keys. The one on the top left takes you straight into your music folder to allow you to choose a track and the other music key, bottom left, drops you into the music player itself. The music quality using the stereo speakers is certainly loud and of not bad quality. The purple light flashes when music is played, cool! With the headphones plugged in I was a bit disappointed. The quality was not great. In fact it was worse than most other phones I have tried and that’s a lot! Considering this is meant to be a music device its a bit of a poor show. The headphones may contribute to the bad sound but as Sony Ericsson insist on using there own USB connecter thingy I could not try the device with my own headphones. Also the headphone connector is massive and adds a good bit of bulk to the width of the device. Pretty flashing lights though!

For those of you that like to listen to the radio on a mobile device you wont be disappointed as the W395 has one and it works fine, although the sound quality isn’t great.

The camera was to be as expected, not great. With no flash low light images are a no no.

Text messaging was fairly painless. The number pad on the phone is nice. The buttons are raised in the centre and dip on the edges to help guide you across them when speed texting.

Connectivity is a bit limited. No 3G or Wi-Fi means web browsing is slow and using the browser on the device felt like I had gone back in time about five years.

There are some quite nice applications in the organizer section. The calendar is decent and creating events is simple. As expected there is also an alarm clock, stopwatch, timer, tasks and calculator.

One feature that I wasn’t expecting to find on this device was flight mode. Good job Sony Ericsson – the kids can play there music on the plane.

Conclusion:

Overall I think the target market for this device is most defiantly children. If having never owned a mobile before then this is not a bad choice. At under £60.00 on pay as you go its reasonable and it must be popular as I found it for sale with all four major UK networks.

My main overall reservations about the W395 were that it just felt a bit dated and although its a Walkman phone the music quality was not what I expected. I’m sure you get what you pay for and it just happens to be that this is a low end device.