By Michell Bak, 19th of October 208

Sony Ericsson recently announced during the Q3 financial results that its C902 model was the hit seller during this quarter. With such a legacy, the W902 is destined to follow in C902’s footsteps as a hit selling phone.
With the W902, Sony Ericsson addresses the relatively small display and limited memory in the C902, as well as adding a few extra features.

The W902 will be available in at least three colour variants - Volcanic Black, Wine Red & Earth Green. Currently, the Volcanic Black variant is the most widely available variant. I’m not quite sure which I fancy the most as they all look attractive.

The majority of the W902’s body is made of plastic. It initially felt rather cheap, but I must admit that it has grown on me lately. The phone feels excellently built, and no matter how hard I try, I simply can’t make the construction creak. On the right side of the W902 are a set of buttons, including three dedicated music buttons. The area around the buttons is rubberized and helps at getting a better hold of the phone - if you’re right-handed. The rubberized area is only on one side of the phone, though, which seems odd.

The back of the W902 looks quite good and is one of the more interesting designs yet. The speaker is located near the bottom along with a lanyard eyelet and a Walkman logo. The middle part of the back is textured, but as said earlier on, this unfortunately does not add to the grip of the phone. The camera and LED is located at the top. Unfortunately, there’s no protective cover for the camera lens.

I wish Sony Ericsson would have spent a bit more time on the battery cover, as it gets a bit loose quite quickly. Not that it falls off or anything, it’s just that it moves a millimetre or two, making it likely to get on your nerves. Once removed, you’ll have access to the standard BST-38 battery (Li-Polymer, 930 mAh) as well as the SIM card and memory card slot. The W902 will accept Memory Stick Micro (M2) cards up to a theoretical 32 gigabytes. The bundled memory card should be sufficient for most, though, at eight gigabytes with plenty of room for up to 8,000 songs encoded in the utmost excellent eAAC+ codec. The battery life is good, and lasts for about four days per charge.

The W902 measures 110 x 49 x 11.7 millimetres, and is by no means a small phone. Even though it’s not among the smallest handsets on the market, it’ll fit beautifully in your pocket. It weighs about 103 grams with the battery included, but strangely it feels heavier. This is undoubtedly due to the metal frame used in it, which just adds to the strength of the body.
It feels OK in your hand, but it’s not among my favourites, especially not when it comes to singlehanded usage.

The TFT-display is 2.2 inches large and sports a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels (QVGA resolution). It is capable of showing up to 262.144 different colours. Colours are very saturated and the contrast levels are about as good as they get on a mobile phone. Only complaint when it comes to the display is the fact that it’s not as bright as I would have liked it to be. Had it been that, it would probably also have meant worse contrast levels and imprecise colours. Below you’ll find a display comparison between the W595, which was a brighter display, and the W902, which trumps with its richer colours and better contrast. From here on, it’s basically up to the individual user and what this user values the most.

Impressive interface and organizer

If you’re a trusty reader of USEB, you’ll know we’re very pleased with Sony Ericsson’s user interface in its feature phones. The software platform used in the W902 is called A2, and its user interface is no different from other new Sony Ericsson feature phones. The interface is highly customizable and can be personalised by adding different themes or creating one yourself.

It is very easy to use the phone due to the excellent interface. The graphical menu icons are large and easy to understand. The soft key layout is also quite easy to get accustomed with, also if you’re upgrading from a Sony Ericsson phone with the old layout.

The phone’s default applications add a bunch of functionality. The messaging client is excellent and far ahead of anything on the market. The phonebook is likewise excellent, and does a good job at managing up to 1000 contacts or 7000 phone numbers. The web browser does a decent job on specially fitted mobile websites, and although it is capable of rendering larger websites, the outcome is generally not that great and in some cases you might even end up freezing the phone. My advice would be to download the free Opera Mini instead, if you plan on browsing a lot with the phone. Also included is a set of location services.
Organizer features include an advanced file manager, alarms, calendar, tasks, notes, remote synchronization, calendar and a code memo application, to name some of them.

Five Java applications come preinstalled on the W902. These are:
AccuWeather.com - A handy weather application capable of displaying forecasts, temperatures, wind speeds, etc.
Music Quiz - Probably one of the best music games (Sony Ericsson calls this an application - I beg to differ) I’ve ever tried. It basically scans your music library on the phone and asks a bunch of questions about the songs based on the music library. The faster you answer (the correct answer), the higher score you get.
Standby World Clock 3D - A simple clock application that displays three world clocks of your own choice. It is optimized to run as an application-wallpaper.
Walk Mate -A pedometer application that keeps track of your daily steps. The application must be running for it to work! It doesn’t matter if you’re running it in the background or as an application-wallpaper, though.
YouTube - This application is the result of a partnership between Sony Ericsson and Google. This client basically enables you to watch video content from YouTube on the phone. Note that this application is heavy on data usage, so it is not recommended to use unless you’ve got an unlimited data plan or alike.

The phone comes with three games preinstalled; FMX III, Jewel Quest 2, and Need for Speed Pro Street. The first is an FMX motocross game in 3D, where the object of the game is to perform tricks and complete events. One would probably refer to Jewel Quest 2 as a board game. In the game you have to match identical relics on a board of different relics by swapping these. Need for Speed Pro Street is a 3D racing game with excellent game play and nice graphics.

You can of course download and install additional Java applications and games.

Excellent for multimedia

The Media application is the place to go if you’re looking for the multimedia on the W902. This application holds any music, pictures, videos, games and web feeds on the phone. The graphical user interface is clean and cool, and it’s generally quite speedy. It’s capable of auto-rotating as well.

Being that the W902 is a Walkman phone, the Walkman player is one of the most essential parts of the phone. The player looks slick, and the player adds support for rotating all the setting menus, so they’ll display properly regardless of it being in portrait or landscape mode. This may only seem rational, but it hasn’t always been like that, so it’s nice that the software team fixed this. Features include various sound settings, TrackID, visualizations, and of course Sony Ericsson’s two gimmick music features, SensMe and Shake Control. The W902 has an FM radio built-in that can be used when either a headset or another accessory capable of acting as an antenna is connected. The FM radio - and radio application - are of very high quality and I’d bet there are few, if any, competing products that can match this.

W902 features the Clear Audio equalizers that make music sound fantastic. The W902 is undoubtedly one of the best music phones on the market with a music quality to match that prestigious title.

The W902 is delivered with a pair of Sony Ericsson’s probably best headphones - the HPM-77. The headphones are capable of delivering really high quality sound, and they feel really good in your ears. There’s no 3.5 mm jack stick in the W902, but this is available in the HPM-77, so you won’t be left completely without support for your standard headphones, although the bundled ones are very good.

Let’s move on to the camera. The W902 has inherited its camera from Sony Ericsson’s top-selling Cyber-shot camera phone, C902. This means it’s got an auto focus camera module and a 5 megapixel resolution (2592 x 1944 pixels) CMOS sensor. It has also inherited the powerful Photoflash from the C902 - I would however still have preferred a proper flash.

As long as the light conditions are good, you’ll get good results with the W902. The photos are sufficiently detailed and are generally pretty sharp (watch out for over-sharpened pictures, though!). During my testing of the camera, I’ve noticed that the photos are underexposed quite often, which is the exact opposite of C902’s photos. This makes the colours darker and generally makes the photos less interesting to look at. Fortunately, this can easily be fixed if you’ve got skills in digital photo editing. You can check out some camera samples below.

You can record videos in MPEG4 format (H.263 codec) in QVGA resolution (that’s 320 x 240 pixels) at 30 frames per second. The videos look fluid, which is a very good thing - especially for a Walkman phone. The video bitrates are variable, but tend to be around 450 Kbps. Video sample below. You’ll probably need QuickTime to play the sample. If you haven’t got that installed, you can download the sample here.

Conclusion

As said to begin with, Sony Ericsson has announced that its C902 model has been selling really well in the third quarter of this year. Admittedly, I had my doubts about the C902 when reviewing a few months ago. Obviously, these were put to shame, and I’ll make sure not to do the same mistake again, which is why I’m feeling pretty safe saying that I think the W902 will be a hit as well. It picks up in most of the areas I didn’t like about the C902, and while doing so it even adds additional functionality - for a premium price, that is. We’ll get back to that in a second.

So, what’s to like about the W902? A lot of things! First and foremost, you’ve got to love the Walkman player and the audio quality produced by this phone. Secondly: the build quality. The phone feels very solid and I most definitely didn’t have to worry about it breaking if it fell out of my pocket or I lost the grip of it. That’s something many takes for granted, and don’t think about until the phone is on the floor - broken. The user interface, applications and organizer features are all excellent as well.

On the negative side of things, I don’t like the fact that there’s no WLAN in the phone. Also, W902 retails for more than £300 unlocked and SIM-free at the moment (that’s about 400 Euro), which seems a bit too pricey. In comparison, the C902 retails for about £200 these days, and the W980 can be purchased for about £250. If Sony Ericsson drops the price fairly quickly, I could see users choosing W902 over C902. If not, I don’t see any reason to pay a premium price to get a few flaws fixed and a larger memory.

You can find a large gallery of the W902 here, and below you’ll find an unboxing video of the W902. As always, feel free to ask questions in the comments below. Before asking, though, please check out our review of the Sony Ericsson C902 and Sony Ericsson W980, as the W902 is 99 percent similar to these.

[Preview based on firmware revision R3DA024]