Another USEB W890 Preview

I received the W890 only a few days ago and it was love at first sight. I love the materials used and the colour variants look absolutely smashing. Build quality feels very good and phone is extremely sturdy. About 30 people have had a look at my W890 so far and all were impressed by the quality of it.
W890 is really thin and has a nice format and weight. It’s less than 80 grams and fits perfectly into any pocket. It feels nice to hold in your palm due to the rounded edges and the nice choice of materials (it’s metal!). Its “wow”-factor beats just about everything else on the market and - in my opinion - it looks so much better than the W880.

This is a Walkman phone so it is of course marketed at music lovers. It comes with a 2 GB memory card which can hold about 500 songs in MP3 format or up to 1,000 - 2,000 songs in advanced AAC codec formats. The speaker isn’t bad but it’s not perfect. It lacks bass and depth. However, if you decide to listen to the music with the bundled earphones everything sounds excellent and the volume level is decent.
The camera is a fixed focus camera with a resolution of 3.15 mega pixels. I’m finding it hard to see why Sony Ericsson had to up the ante on the amount of pixels. In my opinion they should have stuck with 2 mega pixels like on the W880, but again - it is a major selling point for unknowing consumers. The camera performs OK without being superb in any way whatsoever.
Call quality seems pretty good. Volume might be a little low (I’m in doubt whether it’s the phone or me) and the display seems a bit low on brightness (again, this might just be me). Speaking of the display, everything else about it is excellent! The colour saturation is very nice and it is unbelievably crisp. With regards to colour saturation I’d say that it’s on par with the excellent display on the K850. However the K850’s display has its pros and goes out as the winner in this small comparison.

Overall, W890 feels like a really neat phone. Personally, I feel like this is a must-have in my collection and I will now have to do a dig in my wallet to find some money to pay for one of these babies. Price is about £200 - £250, which isn’t too bad.
Expect an in-depth going review of W890 with lots of photos late this week. A gallery of the phone will come later today.

Posted by 
Nice use of feathers!
Good review. Didn’t overdo it on details! It looks like a very tidy phone. Nothing spectacular but ticking all boxes for the mid-lower (i.e. not feature freak) end of the market.
I’m hoping the C902 doesn’t disappoint as my next upgrade like I thought the K850i did with it’s weird buttons! That or the G800, but I’m really not interested in a smartphone.
8:18 pm on 3/17/08“With regards to colour saturation I’d say that it’s on par with the excellent display on the K850. However the K850’s display has its pros [...]”
This one is good.
Furthermore, Eldar has stated that “In terms of picture quality, this is a decent display; however it ends up behind the Sony Ericsson W880i because of somewhat faded colors [...], the W890i still can’t match it in brightness and colors. ”
And when comparing to the K660i (also 2″ display) : “in theory it had to retain the same display, but, surprisingly, we found out that the pictures offered by these two phones were immensely different – the W890i’s display was lackluster in comparison. Probably, the only legitimate explanation is that for such a slender handset they had to cut power consumption in every way possible. “
2:08 am on 3/18/08