Design and Looks
The W595 bears a striking resemblance with the W580 but has many visual enhancements over its older sibling. The phone is adorned with metal accents on the sides and edges, and also features a rubberized back. They add to both, the aesthetic appeal and ergonomic feel of the compact wedge-shaped phone. Other design improvements include stereo loudspeakers at the top and bottom slope of the phone so the loudspeakers do not get muffled when the phone is placed on its back, which is where loudspeakers are normally found.
The slider's front is dominated by the large 2.2” 262K QVGA resolution screen that produces sharp pictures of amazing quality. Below this are the dedicated music keys/D-pad and the soft-keys. The keys offer decent tactility on account of being reasonably large and well-spaced. On the side of the phone is the dedicated walkman button, pressing which invokes the walkman music player and also sets the phone is Shake mode for Shake control.
Sliding out the phone reveals the alphanumeric keypad. It's different than the one seen on the W580 and offers better touch-orientation than its predecessor. The keys are large and well-spaced but flat and offer little touch feedback; nonetheless it's easy to use them even without looking down at the keypad ever so often- a perfect match for speed-demon SMS addicts. Another improvement seen on this keypad over the one seen on the W580 is that this keypad does not make cracking sounds.
The phone is moderately sized and sports a great build. The design makes the phone very pocketable and easy to operate single-handedly or with the phone in the slide-out position. Telephony is on par with the best standards with both call clarity and reception being of the highest quality. Another nice feature here is the smart search that lets users find contacts on the homescreen by gradually typing the desired contact's name.
Moving on to software, the phone runs the popular and visually appealing Sony Ericsson Flash Lite themed UI. Like always, Flash Lite UI comes with the Activity menu that is SE's answer to Nokia's Active Standby. The Activity menu manages applications' multi-tasking (the running apps tab) in addition to generating a list of user or machine defined favourites. On the whole the user interface is lively and quick to respond to user commands. Many areas of the interface can be controlled using the phone's accelerometer and makes operating the phone both fun and easy. For example, tilting the phone will cause the screen to rotate automatically.
The gallery too is worth a hoot and features similar accelerometer control. Apart from this, the gallery supports one-click access to the latest snapshot, a timeline view to arrange photos chronologically, and filtering photos using tags or only the ones that are marked as favourites. Browsing pictures in the gallery does not come without transition effects, and in this case, pictures move from the left to right or vice-versa depending on the direction of your browsing (backwards or forwards.) When playing a slideshow, the phone prompts users to pick a mood, which then determines the transition effects and the music playing in the background during the slideshow.
The phone's snapper is a 3MP unit that performs reasonably well. It features the intuitive Sony Cyber-shot interface which is a definite plus. Photos have low noise-levels but the phone over sharpens images rather aggressively leading to loss of fine detail. Then in most cases the white balance is off. Naturally the orientation of the camera can be changed easily thanks to auto-rotation enabled for the camera view finder. The camera also offers geotagging based on cell-phone triangulation which is not as accurate as GPS. However it is possible to pair an external GPS device to the phone which can better aid the geotagging of photos.
The core of the phone's interface is the Media Center which gives access to the Walkman 3.0 Music Player. The player provides compatibility for a variety of formats and five different equalizer presets that naturally includes SE's proprietary MegaBass. All these are standard on any Walkman music phone but what makes this one special is the accelerometer control which lets you change music parameters by shaking or tilting the phone when keeping the walkman key depressed. For example, shaking the phone in the forward direction once makes the player skip to the next track and doing it vice-versa has the opposite effect. Shaking it both, once forward and once back shuffles to a random track. And tilting the phone gently changes the volume.
Another interesting feature here is the SenseMe option which populates a playlist of appropriate songs for users depending on his or her mood. For this to work, the user must input their mood using a two point coordinate system, one axis for the mood and the other for tempo. But for this to work, the songs need to be tagged by Sony Ericsson Media Manager with SenseMe turned on while transferring songs.
The audio quality is somewhat poor and exhibits uneven frequency response with boosted bass and treble frequencies and low mid frequencies. Fortunately, other audio quality parameters are decent and worthy of the Walkman name. SE provides a bass reflex set of earphones with the packaging that is of good quality. The earphones are attached to a two-pin stereo share adapter which is then connected to the phone's proprietary audio port. The two pin system naturally allows you to pair two sets of earphones at a time so two people can listen to the phone at the same time.
The W595 also offers a wide range of connectivity options including 3G and PictBridge so you are not out of the loop. The phone packs in the Access NetFront browser which does an excellent job of emulating a PC browser. To begin with, it has a cursor that can be moved around with the D-pad, a find-on-page option, autorotate for screen orientation and finally, an option to view text only.
Organizing applications include File Manager, Alarms, Video Call, Calendar, Task Notes, Synchronization, Timer, Stopwatch, Calculator, Code memo. This is fairly comprehensive and should offer a good substitute for a business centered PDA phone. Finally, like any SE phone, the W595 is loaded with applications including Comeks Strip, Music Mate, Music Quiz, Music Mate 5, Google Maps, World Clock 3D, Rock Bobblehead, Walk Mate and a YouTube client which lets users upload and view clips from the popular online video website, YouTube.com.
We'll finish this review of the phone by stating its one, big glaring disadvantage- the phone costs way too much despite it's near perfect image.
Features
- 2.2” 256K TFT display with QVGA resolution
- 3MP camera
- 3G connectivity
- Accelerometer for auto-rotate
- Stereo speakers
- Dual 3.5mm Stereo Share jack on the headset cable
- Dedicated Walkman music key
- Walkman 3.0 music player with Shake control and SenseMe
- Smart dialing support
Accessories
- MW600 Bluetooth headset
- MH907 headset with SenseMe Control
- Bluetooth Headset VH310
- Clip-on Bluetooth Handsfree VH300
- HGE-100 GPS
