By Michell Bak, 17th of October 2008

The Sony Ericsson W580 was a great hit, especially among youngsters, and its successor, the W595, is set to take over where W580 left. W595 is a funky looking HSDPA-enabled Walkman phone in a slick and thin slider trim that will appeal to most.

You can get the W595 in a variety of colour variants. Currently, you can choose between Active Blue, Cosmopolitan White, Jungle Grey, and Ruby Black. My personal favourites have to be the first two mentioned variants - they look rather cool!
I really like the materials used in the W595. Most parts of the phone feel rubberised, which is very nice. The build quality is very good. It feels rather solid and the slider mechanism is likewise well built. The keys are well-spaced and provide good tactile feedback. The keypad does feel a bit cramped at the top row, though. The back of the W595 looks pretty clean, and with exception of the back of the slider, there’s not a whole lot to talk about here. The slider back does look nice, though.

If you remove the battery cover, you’ll not only access the standard BST-33 battery (Li-Polymer, 950 mAh), but also the SIM card holder as well as the memory card slot. The W595 is capable of reading Memory Stick Micro (M2) cards, and comes bundled with a 2 gigabyte card that should hold a fair amount of music. I’ve been really pleased with the battery performance, and it even managed run a total of five days on a single charge - impressive by my standards!

The W595 measures 100 x 47 x 14 millimetres, and tips the scales at a relatively mere 104 grams. It doesn’t look as heavy as written, but I’m pretty sure that’s solely because of the high quality materials. The size of the phone is excellent. It’ll fit in just about all pockets, and I believe it feels good in your hand.

The 2.2-inch TFT display is of decent physical size. Its resolution is at 240 x 320 pixels (QVGA), and it seems rather crisp. One of the factors I value the highest when it comes to displays is how good it looks. And admittedly, the display does look nice - as long as you don’t start comparing it to other displays that is. I received the W902 together with the W595, so it would be rather obvious to compare it to the display on the W902, which - by looking at the specifications - is identical to the one on W595. In real life, however, the display on the W595 is way behind the one on W902. While it is indeed a lot brighter, its colours are far from as saturated as those on the W902 display, and the W902 is miles ahead when it comes to contrast. Having said that, the display on the W595 does look great as long as you don’t start comparing it to other recent and more expensive phones’ display.

Awesomeness comes included

Sony Ericsson once again impresses with a fabulous user interface that is highly customizable and very easy to get accustomed with, even for newcomers. As said, you can customize the look of the phone dramatically by changing the theme. The W595 comes preloaded with five rather impressive themes (Clarity, Connecto, Pastelle, Splatta and Walkman), and you can download or even create themes yourself if none of these suit you.

The user interface is quick to use, and the graphical icons and menus make it very easy to use the phone.

W595 comes with no less than eight preinstalled applications.
Comeks Strips is a funny application that enables you to create small comics strips complete with pictures, text and effects.
Converter is Sony Ericsson’s excellent converter application that can convert all kinds of stuff.
Music Mate 5 is Sony Ericsson’s tune creator application that lets you create simple tunes, and adds further support for the built-in motion sensor.
Music Quiz has to be one of the coolest applications on the W595. Its name is pretty self-explanatory, and it makes use of your music collection to ask questions about the songs. It’s good fun, and iPod owners might know this game, although Sony Ericsson’s version seems ahead of Apple’s.
Rock Bobblehead is what I’d call a gimmick application that is basically an Elvis doll that moves according to the phone’s movements.
Walk Mate is a pedometer application that can count your daily steps and will tell you if you’re not walking enough. Walk Mate has to be running either as an application-wallpaper or in the background to work integrated with the rest of the phone.
World Clock 3D is a world clock application (who would have guessed?) in the shape of a 3D globe.
YouTube is the last application preinstalled on the W595. This will enable you to watch videos from YouTube on the phone. Mind you, though, that this can be very expensive if you don’t have an unlimited data plan or alike.

The W595 runs the A2 software platform, which means you’ll get a variety of standard applications as well. Location services, advanced file manager, alarms, calendar with tasks, notes, synchronization capabilities, and a calculator are just some of them.

For entertainment purposes, the W595 comes with four preinstalled games; Extreme Air Snowboarding, Guitar Rock Tour, QuadraPop and Racing Fever GT. With the exception of QuadraPop, which has never really done anything for me, I enjoy playing all the games, and there are plenty of hours of good gaming in them.

Multimedia

The Media application houses most multimedia on the W595. This is where you can find photos, videos, music, games and web feeds. The application is fairly speedy, and looks very good.

The Walkman player is hidden in the Music-section of the Media application. As always, the music player looks good and sports some interesting and good features, as well as a few gimmicks, including Shake Control and SensMe. The audio quality is most definitely approved, and I had a hard time telling W595 from W902, although W902 does sound marginally better. I don’t think most people would notice the difference.
The W595 comes with a special headset with two 3.5 mm jack ports, so you and a friend can listen at the same time. Keep in mind, though, that the total effect and volume will be split. If you decide to listen through the phone’s built-in speakers, you’ll get pretty good stereo sound.

The camera is unfortunately with fixed focus. The resolution is at 3.15 megapixels (2048 x 1536 pixels), which in my opinion is way too much for a phone like this. The sensor is simply too small and not advanced enough to cope with the high resolution. The way I see it, the only reason why the camera resolution is so high, is because it’s a sales gimmick.

In the best possible conditions, the camera delivers a pretty mediocre performance. The colours are generally pretty good, but the cramped pixels and the post-processing create a lot of smear in the photos, especially in areas of high complexity (usually high levels of details). In addition to that, I’ve been noticing some white balance issues with whites turning blue and yellowish. You can find some camera samples below. I’ll upload some more soon!

Videos can be recorded in MP4 format (H.263 codec) at maximum resolution of 320 x 240 pixels and at a bitrate of about 400 Kbps. The frame rate is at 15 frames per second, which makes it look a bit jaggy. Other than that the video quality is actually rather good. I’ll upload a video sample soon!

Conclusion

I wouldn’t doubt for a second that the W595 will be a hit among teenagers and youngsters. It’s a great music phone with a nice design and cool features. The excellent games and broad variety of applications, including YouTube, are something that will make the handset even more attractive to this group of buyers.

I like the Walkman player and generally the music part of the phone. Many people will find this phone capable of replacing the stand-alone music player. I also like the Media application, and support for 3.6 Mbps HSDPA and fast Bluetooth transfers with Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR.

On a more negative side of things, I didn’t like the camera. It feels like it was put there just to be there. Props to Sony Ericsson for using the Cyber-shot like camera user interface, though. I also don’t like the fact that there’s no WLAN in this phone, even though it’s a midrange model. It comes with access to YouTube and other services that can be heavy on the data usage, so this should have been included or at least offered as an add-on functionality with an accessory. There has been talk of such an accessory, but Sony Ericsson has yet to announce it.

We’ve posted a large gallery of the Sony Ericsson W595 over here, and you can check out our unboxing video as well as video preview right under here. Don’t hesitate on asking questions in the comments!

[Preview based on firmware revision R3DA024]

Unboxing:

Preview: