The Walkman range of mobile phones originally took its name from Sony’s portable music devices before the company merged with Ericsson, these devices were widely held as being the highest quality cd and mp3 players in the industry.

Sony Ericsson have adopted the Walkman name to a number of music orientated mobile phones which concentrate on ease of upload and organisation, music quality and innovative features setting the range aside from stand alone MP3 Players.

Introducing new features and high quality sound that cannot be found in stand alone devices, the manufacturer hopes to convince consumers that there is no longer a need to take multiple entertainment devices with them when leaving the home. The Walkman phone range features cameras, multimedia players, games and communication features that should negate the need to carry digital cameras, MP3 and MP4 players and hand held gaming consoles with all the latest technology wrapped up into one device.

The latest addition the this ever expanding range is the Sony Ericsson W910i Havanna Gold Edition which compliments other colours of the model in Red and Black.
The handsets emphasis is clearly on music and the W910i features the very latest version of music software, Walkman 3.0, allowing the user to organise and listen to high quality music, audio books and access podcasts to keep up to date with their chosen subject.

The new software lets the user play, rewind, fast forward, equalise, shuffle tracks and create playlists just like in any other digital music player and the Walkman player also supports several file formats including MP3 and AAC.

Users can transfer music tracks and entire CDs to the phone using Disc2phone software that makes uploading new content easy by simply dragging and dropping files into the phones memory on the screen of their PC.

The W910i also features megabass which enhances the overall music experience by adding depth and stereo widening for a bigger sound, and there is also an FM radio with RDS which displays the name of the station which is tuned into and the information about the artist and track playing.

TrackID is a new feature to the mobile phone market and allows the user to record a few seconds of a song and to send the music to the Gracenote Mobile MusicID database for recognition.

The Sony W910i features ‘shake mode’ first seen in the W580i Walkman phone, this feature is a version of shuffle that randomly selects a track from the memory but the difference is that this can be done by simply pushing a button and physically shaking the phone, if the user does not like the selection they can simply shake the handset again for another track.

Away from the music there is a 2.0 megapixel camera with a flash for low light photography and zoom function for close ups, the camera also supports video playback and record which can be viewed on the large 262,144 colour TFT screen.

The new Sony Ericsson W910i is firmly aimed at people who enjoy their music and like to organise their life around it, the latest software allows for far more personalisation and ease of upload so the primary function of listening to music takes presidence.

By: Daniel Ruskin