Phones.com » Cell Phones » Review of the Sony Ericsson W760

The W760 is a slider available in three attractive colours, i.e., Silver, Red and Black. At 15 mm slim, it is not very pocketable, but feels good in one's hands at 103 grams. The build quality is as expected of Sony Ericsson range, very sturdy and rugged. The screen was medium sized at 2.2 inches, displaying QVGA at 262K colors. The front panel, with the slider closed, shows a total 6 keys and a navigational pad. In addition there are two "game keys" on top of the display which from the homescreen provide access to the photo gallery. The D-pad was ergonomically designed. There was a tiny thumbrest to slide open the handset, but it was not effective due to the very small size. The numeric keys are good in that they're comfortably spaced and offer tactile feedback. Typing out messages was fast with the T9 prediction. The right side of the device has a volume rocker. On top of the phone was an M2 card slot. 

There's no denying that the W760 was a high-end walkman, but sadly it lacked a good camera. What we found was just a tiny aperture on the rear and a label "3 megapixel" beside it. The camera has no Flash, no Auto-focus either. To disappoint you further, it took shots only in portrait. However, the photo quality was decent in daylight. The walkman features were all there, the popular Sony Ericsson's music player, with its latest clever feature called Shakecontrol. With this option you caqn easily change tracks by just shaking the phone. The accelerometer in the phone also took care of screen rotation. What's special about the W760 is that it's the first walkman to have an integrated GPS. The phone supported automatic geo-tagging of pictures taken with the camera and works quite well with the 3-month trial version of WayFinder software provided. The Sony Ericsson Media Center is something new to us, and it featured management of all media on the phone as well as allowed us to stream videos from Youtube. There's also another feature for disco-goers, the SensMe feature detects the mood and tempo of the user and creates playlists on the go accordingly. The W760 walkman as a usual feature had a stereo FM Radio with RDS and Stereo speakers on its sides. Other features on the W760 include PTT, a full featured Organiser, Picture editing and Voice memo. The W760 surprisingly lacked a video conferencing camera.

The Sony Ericsson W760 has good connectivity options. It is Quad-band GSM compatible, meaning it can operate under 850/900/1800/1900 MHz bands of GSM. It further supports EDGE Class 10 and GPRS on these networks. There's a Mainland China version with slight modification available as a regional variant. The triband 3G makes the W760 functional at 850/1900/2100 MHz. HSDPA is supported almost anywhere available. The Walkman leaves out WLAN connectivity, but has Bluetooth 2.0 A2DP for local wireless connectivity. There's the newer HID profile on this phone which allows it to be used as a PC remote control. There's also USB 2.0 available for synching purposes.

The W760 is powered by a strong 930 mAh Li-Po battery. The phone is rated for up to 9 hours talk time on 2G and 4 hours on 3G. As a Walkman phone, the phone can operate in offline mode for dedicated music playback up to 20 hours. Standby of the device is specified as up to 350 hours in 3G networks.

Like the many Sony Ericsson walkman phones out there, the W760 proves to be a good deal. But once you buy it, don't complain us about the camera quality or lack of video conferencing.