Hands on with Sony's first Walkman smartphone

It's curious to see the buttons on the venerable Ericsson interface undergo a game of musical chairs.

When the music stopped this time, we found the return key now nestling the left hand edge of the phone, under a two-way scroll wheel. Sony Ericsson's decision to drop the two-plane scroll (one that can be towards you and away from you) that it used in three generations of its smartphone flagship, in favor of a simple Jog Dial, has been widely criticised. On the P990, this results in an instant loss of functionality over earlier models: it's no longer possible, for example, to navigate through the pull-down menus with the wheel - or activate (or deactivate) the key guard. But on the M600 this didn't matter so much, and having a return key under the Jog Dial felt intuitive.

The traditional Cancel key remains on the face of the phone. A Walkman key takes you directly to the music player, and three navigation buttons - like the keypad, recessed under a flat surface - light up when the music player is active. And the soft keys have now moved onto the touch screen itself.

Sony Ericsson is aiming hard at the 4GB sweet spot that Apple discovered to be so lucrative. The iPod Mini debuted with 4GB and its slimline successor, the Nano, continues with this capacity alongside a 2GB version. On the downside, there's no removable storage in the M950, presumably to keep the dimensions and cost down.

That might not please the power user, but in several important aspects Sony Ericsson has hit the target very firmly in the bullseye. Talk time and music play time are quite outstanding, particularly for a 3G smartphone. Talk time is 7.5 hours on a 2G network, and 23 hours in offline mode: far longer than any Apple device. The device uses full speed USB 2.0 transfers, breaking a bottleneck of its feature-phone predecessors.

The drawbacks? One is immediately apparent: the W950 retains the Ericsson connector at the base of the phone, and there's no standard headphone jack. This is the strangest design decision for a device where so much thought has gone into usability. Sony Ericsson will ship an adaptor cable, so you can then attach any headphone you wish, but this is unnecessary, and another wire to tangle. Few may regret the absence of a camera, and fewer still the decision to stick with Bluetooth 1.2.

We hesitate to draw any conclusions from the performance of the prototype, but it was no slower than the traditional feature phones in the range it supersedes, and of course it packs a lot more power. But as with so many other manufacturers, usability isn't up to standard of simpler predecessors. On-screen soft keys are a poor substitute for real buttons, and changing applications requires a fiddly tap on the top right of the screen. (But the bottom left on Sony Ericsson's other UIQ 3.0 phone, the P990. Odd). Nor does this even bring up a task list - that requires a separate tap to bring the other tab to the fore. A dedicated application/switcher key would ease things considerably. So while UIQ 3.0 was designed primarily one-handed use, its predecessor was in practice much easier to use one-handed.

Sony Ericsson isn't alone in this - it was a theme of the show, and Nokia and now Motorola also deserve the thumbs down for their unraveling, and increasingly fussy user interfaces. With release scheduled for Q3, there's six months of time to address this. But from a first impression, the W950 Walkman is shaping up to be a competitively priced music player and a powerful, low cost smartphone in a svelte package.

While your reporter remains sceptical that any multipurpose device can 'kill' the iPod, there's a lot to be said for lower cost devices with greater performance, and the W950 in some respects lives up to this. Phones lack the ease of use from iTunes' dedicated interface, and even more importantly, the synchronization with iTunes - but they will be subsidized by operators keen to buy into a slice of Apple's market.

The choice is getting a lot more difficult. ®