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By Michell Bak, 6th of October 2008.

The Sony Ericsson W980 is Sony Ericsson’s newest and coolest looking Walkman phones. Music is in essence, and with superb audio quality, the Walkman 3 player, an FM-transmitter, external music controls and a massive 8 gigabytes of onboard memory, that should be pretty obvious to anybody. While the design looks rather slick, there are some potentially annoying design issues that should have been dealt with before even announcing it.

Official product pictures of the Sony Ericsson W980

Advantages

• Quad-band GSM / EDGE
• UMTS / HSDPA (up to 3.6 Mpbs)
• Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR
• Slick clamshell design
• External display and music controls
• 8 gigabytes of onboard memory
• Impressive user interface
• 2.2 inch bright colour display
• Superb sound quality
• FM-transmitter
• Stereo speakers and bundled headphones

Disadvantages

• Design issues
• Front is exposed to scratches
• Mediocre camera, lacking auto focus
• No WLAN

There are no phones similar to the W980 in Sony Ericsson’s portfolio that I can think of at the moment. The W980 is the only high-end (Walkman branded) clamshell phone, and there are no other similar generic phones from Sony Ericsson, which - in my opinion - is a good thing.

The sales box is rather standard. The content is separated in three smaller boxes, one holding the phone, one containing the accessories, and one with the manuals and software disc. W980 comes bundled with an excellent set of earphones - the PM-77, which is undoubtedly Sony Ericsson’s finest offering. It also comes with a USB cable and a standard charger. Unfortunately there’s no extra speaker or alike, which would have been nice.  The last box contains a few product manuals, a few getting-started manuals, the SAR information papers and of course the software disc with the PC Suite and Media Manager software.

Hot design with a few flaws

The W980 is a medium-sized clamshell phone, measuring 92 x 46 x 16.9 millimetres. Curiously, the phone felt a bit thick in my pocket, even though it’s only about 17 millimetres in depth - I’m guessing it might just be me. The dimensions are considerably larger when opened, of course. W980 tips the scales at a perfect one-hundred grams. I find this weight pretty fitting - had it been much lighter, it would most likely have felt rather cheap.
The Sony Ericsson W980 is currently available in three colour variants; Opera Brown, Piano Black & Violin Red. A cute white variant should appear later on to accompany the three other variants.

When the W980 is closed, the front of the phone could easily look like that of a standalone music player, especially when the front keys are unlocked and the phone is set to Walkman mode rather than one of the other two standby modes.
Sony Ericsson’s managed to put an OLED display on the front, that’s invisible when the screen is off, just like on previous phones such as Z610.
At the bottom of the front is a see-through piece of plastic with a Walkman logo behind it. Inside this piece of see-through plastic are located four LEDs that will pulse in orange and white.

When you open up the W980, you’ll notice two things - the large, bright and colourful 2.2 inch display, and the large rather special-looking keypad. Honestly, I think the keypad is too large and the keys are too separated, making it a bit hard - for me - to use the keypad singlehandedly. The keypad is generally responsive, and it gives a good tactile feedback. The soft keys are not as good as the keypad, but they’re not bad either. One thing to note about the soft keys, though, is that once in a while they leave small marks on the main display, which can be a bit annoying. I don’t see why Sony Ericsson didn’t notice this design flaw while beta-testing it.

The backside is pretty standard to Sony Ericsson’s Walkman range - a rubberized back that feels nice in hand. The extremely illogically placed camera is also on the backside, just about where your finger would decide to rest about 90 percent of the time when using the phone. Other than that, there’s not much to mention here.

On the left side of the W980, we’ve got a lanyard eyelet, the proprietary Fast Port connector, used for charging, transferring data, connecting to a headset, etc., and one of the two speakers. There’s also a funny LED on the left side, but it doesn’t seem like it’s used for anything whatsoever - odd.
The right side holds the second speaker (yes, stereo speakers), a lock mechanism, a button for changing the standby mode on the external display, and of course the volume keys.

Both the bottom and the top of the W980 are empty.

The battery cover is rather hard to remove. Once it’s off, though, it’s easy to put back in place. The battery powering the W980 is a standard BST-38 (Li-Polymer), good for 930 mAh.
Sony Ericsson’s official battery statements are 370 hours of standby life, or 9 hours of talk on GSM networks. On 3G networks, the battery will be good for 360 hours of standby life or 4½ hours of talk. W980 is generally well-performing and was running for at least four days per charge during the review period.

Almost flawless user interface

The software used in the Sony Ericsson W980 is Sony Ericsson’s latest feature phone software, also known as the A2(00) software platform. It provides a brilliant user interface, speedy menus and offers great possibilities to customize the look and feel of the interface. During the review period, the W980 was running the latest firmware, and I didn’t manage to find a single bug in my everyday usage. It’s just felt stabile and kept on going.

In the early days of the A2 software platform, multitasking could be a problem. Many people would experience annoying slow-downs when multitasking, i.e. listening to a song while writing an SMS message. This particular problem is no longer a problem, at least not with the W980. You will still run into slow-downs when running a lot of applications simultaneously, but keeping it below 5-6 applications / games should be fine.

As said, the user interface is very good, and it is amongst the best in mobile phones. The W980 comes with five preloaded themes for each and every taste, and you can download and install thousands of free themes for the phone or create a personalized theme yourself with the free theme creator application for your computer.

The menu layout can also be set according to your liking. If you choose to change the layout, you’ll be presented with a list of available layouts. These are: Grid, Rotating, Single Icon or Theme, which will make use of the Flash Lite menu specified in the active theme, if any.

There’s not really a whole lot more to say about the user interface. It’s easy to use, and you’ll get accustomed to it very quickly. The soft key layout is logical, and most people will also quickly learn to find their way around them.

Applications

The W980 comes with a decent amount of pre-installed applications. There are a total of six pre-installed applications to be found in the Applications folder.

AccuWeather is a weather application, that can come in handy when you’re out or maybe even on vacation. It can display forecasts, temperatures, wind speeds and more.

Sony Ericsson’s Converter application is luckily also installed on W980, and adds functionality by converting distances, volumes, weights, temperatures, speeds, areas and even tips!

Music Mate 5 is the new and comprehensive music composer, and it’s extra fun to use when you’re using the built-in motion sensor.

Standby World is a rather nifty application that can display three customizable - and great looking - world clocks, and it can also be used as a wallpaper application.

Walk Mate adds a pedometer-like feature to the W980’s feature set, so you can keep track of your daily steps. Note that the application has to be running in order for it to work, hence the admirably low amount of steps in the screenshot! Yeah, let’s stick to that story…

World Clock 3D is the sixth application on the W980, and it’s another sort of clock application that can give you a 3D view of the globe with all the world clocks.

The file manager is absolutely brilliant as always. It sorts the files by type, so your camera snapshots are in one folder, your other pictures in one folder, music files in one folder, and so on. The file manager is also tabbed so you can switch between the memory source (all, memory card, and phone memory) the displayed content. It works really well. The file manager is capable of performing most standard tasks, such as copying files, marking several files, renaming, moving, create folders, and so on. You can also send files directly from the file manager, or make use of the links to edit the content (pictures and videos).

The built-in calendar is rather good, and definitely suits my needs and the majority of most people’s needs as well, I guess. I still haven’t come across a situation where I’ve felt it lacked a feature in the calendar, which in addition to that, has been slightly updated compared to the one in previous Sony Ericsson feature phones. As you’d expect, you can create rather detailed appointments and reminders, add notes to these, and perform a search. What more would you want a calendar to do?

The W980 also supports content synchronization via either SyncML or Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync.  While it’s been reported to be working quite well, I’ve also heard talk about some limitations. Ultimately, I see this feature as an extra rather than anything else. The W980 is not a business or work phone - for that there are other brilliant phones out there with better synchronization capabilities.

As with any other Sony Ericsson phone you’ll have a variety of pretty standard organizer applications, such as alarms, tasks, notes, timer, stopwatch and even an application for keeping your secrets and passwords safe with a 4-character code (that’s a total of 10,000 possible codes).

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The Media application holds most of your media and web networking on the phone, including photos, music, videos, games and web feeds. The Media part of the platform is set to be updated, although I’m not sure if the update will include the W980 and other current phones. We’ll leave you with a few screenshots for now, and talk about it later on in the camera and Walkman parts of the review.

Like any newer A2-based feature phone by Sony Ericsson, the W980 features Sony Ericsson’s proprietary Location services, which is basically a menu tab with Google Maps and a bit more, like status info and logs, although the latter is only available if connected to a Bluetooth GPS unit.

Last-minute-decision camera?

It seems like Sony Ericsson really doesn’t want you to use the camera on the W980. First of all, the design team made the utmost brilliant decision to put the camera in possibly the most stupid place on the phone - right where you’ve got your finger when holding the phone. Brilliant, isn’t it? Next up, to make it all that more interesting to use, auto focus was ditched, and there’s no flash either.
The camera shoots at a 3.2 mega pixel resolution (2048 x 1536 pixels).

The camera user interface hasn’t changed a bit from other Sony Ericsson phones without a camera key on the side, such as the W760. This basically means that you won’t get the better looking landscape interface, which is easier and faster to use, but instead you’re left with a portrait mode interface that is slower to use and quite frankly looks outdated. Having said so, it is not among the worst camera interfaces on the market, and it’s considerably faster than most.

The following camera settings are available, of which most are available in video mode as well.

• View all pictures
• Shoot mode - Normal, Panorama, Frames, Burst
• Picture size - 3 MP, 2 MP, 1 MP, VGA
• Night mode - Off, On
• Self-timer - Off, On
• White balance - Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Fluorescent, Incandescent
• Effects - Off, Black & white, Negative, Sepia
• Picture quality - Fine, Normal
• Review - On, Off
• Add position - On, Off
• Shutter sound - Sound 1, Sound 2, Sound 3, Sound 4, Off
• Reset settings

Sony Ericsson has of course included a few key short cuts for shoot mode, night mode and the self-timer feature. You can zoom up to 3.2 times digitally, but only when in VGA (640 x 480 pixels) mode. The exposure can be digitally altered as well in 0.3 intervals from -2.0 to +2.0. The exposure is controlled by the volume control keys.

Below are some camera samples - press the thumbnails for the full size samples.

The level of details in the W980 camera samples is not that high. Even in good lighting conditions you’re likely to get a smear of colours rather than details. Once it gets darker, the results get even worse, and W980 lacks a flash so there’s no help to get there.

While the W980 is pretty good at choosing sufficient shutter speeds outdoors, it is absolutely horrendous at doing so indoors, especially if your subject is a bit dark. While reviewing the W980, I often found it choosing very slow shutter speeds that wouldn’t even be ideal to use on a d-SLR camera, let alone a phone that’s considerably lighter, making it harder to hold it still. The ISO is unfortunately fixed at ISO-80. It would have loved to see a bit of range here, so you could avoid those horridly slow shutter speeds.

It seems like there are a few white balance issues from time to time, but W980 is generally pretty good at reproducing colours and even skin tones.

Videos are recorded in MP4 format (and encoded in H.263 codec) in QVGA resolution (320 x 240 pixels). The W980 records at a variable video bitrate at 400 - 500 Kbps, which is a rather high bitrate for this resolution. The framerate is at 15 frames per second, and it simply feels too slow. You can see the quality for yourself below, if you’ve got QuickTime installed. If not, you can download the video file here by right clicking and saving the file.

Your snaps and videos can be viewed in the Media application by either changing from camera/video mode to view mode in the menu, or by accessing the application from the menu. In here you can browse all the content, pass it on to friends and family, add tags, zoom in on photos, view photos on a map, if they’re geo-tagged, edit photos and videos, apply the PhotoFix corrections, or view your photos in a slideshow.

World’s best music phone

Not only does the W980 come with the latest version of the Walkman player - version 3 - it also comes with a staggering eight gigabytes of internal memory, cool FM-transmitter and superb audio quality with the ClearAudio equalizers.

The phone is capable of decoding most commonly used audio codecs, including AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, MP3, RealAudio 8 and several versions of the WMA codec.

The Walkman player looks slick as always, and it’s generally a pleasure to use it - both on the internal display, but most definitely also on the external display with the dedicated touch sensitive controls on the front of the flip.

You can set equalizer settings, play settings, visualization settings, light effects and more in the player menu. During music playback, the set of LEDs on the top of the phone will pulse according to the beat of the song playing. In addition to that, the song details will also be listed on the wallpaper if you’ve got one of the preloaded Flash Lite-based themes activated.

While we’re at the gimmicks, the W980 has a bit more to offer than what meets the eye. It of course features Sony Ericsson’s ultra-hyped Shake Control feature, which makes it possible to change songs, shuffle and control the volume.

Now to the probably most important and most hyped thing of them all: the audio quality. How does it sound? Well, I’ll keep it short - fantastic! The ClearAudio equalizers are spectacular, and make the sound incredibly rich. In addition to that take the excellent bundled HPM-77 earphones and you’ll be good to go. No doubt whatsoever that the W980 could replace any stand-alone music player on the market.

As something new, the W980 features an FM-transmitter. This means that you can transmit the songs you’re playing on your phone on an FM frequency, i.e. so you can listen to songs on your W980 wirelessly in your car radio. I’ve been testing out this feature a lot, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s an absolutely terrific feature to have on a music phone. Admittedly, the audio quality is undeniably perfect with the FM-transmitter and there is a bit of noise, but I didn’t really find this as being that much of a problem.

Jumping from the FM-transmitter to the FM-radio… The radio can be used whenever a headset, or any other accessory that is capable of acting as the antenna, is connected. It is possible to automatically store up to 20 FM frequencies, and these will be stored with whatever information is available with the built-in RDS support (name, info text, currently playing song, etc.). Not only does RDS provide those useful pieces of information, it’ll also automatically update the FM frequency if a better frequency is available.

Sony Ericsson’s special TrackID service is also available when using the radio. The service records a small bit of the song playing, and uploads it to a server, and after a very short while the song information will be displayed in the web browser, if it was available in Gracenote’s huge database. It’s a really neat free service, although it will most likely cost you a few pennies in data transfer costs.

Motion gaming

The W980 comes with three games pre-installed.

Lumines Block Challenge is a tetris-style game. I’ve personally never found it any interesting, and I guess you’ll really have to want to play the game to understand it - or read the instructions, of course…

Need for Speed Pro Street is a really nice 3D racing game that makes use of the built-in accelerometer in the W760. This means you can steer the cars either by the d-pad or by moving, tilting and playing around with the phone. This way of gaming is rather nice, and seems intuitive for most, although it takes a minute or two to get the hang of. It can not only be played in portrait mode, also in landscape mode, although it’s not really any good on the W980 because it’s a clamshell phone.

Sudoku is, as you’d probably guessed, a game of using your brain and math skills. It’s actually a very nice sudoku game, and if you’re into this kind of gaming and entertainment, then I’m sure it’ll be a hit.

Keeps you connected and on-line

The W980 is a quad-band GSM phone with support for EDGE, UMTS and HSDPA (2100) networks up to 3.6 Mpbs. It supports Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR, which will give you speeds up to 150 kilobytes per second. It also supports A2DP, so you can listen to stereo music via Bluetooth.
W980 supports USB 2.0 with speeds at about 1.5 - 2 megabytes per second, which is pretty fast for a feature phone like this. There’s no support for the aging infrared connection.

The default web browser is the Access NetFront browser (version 3.4), and there’s of course support for installing additional web browsers if you want, although NetFront is generally a decent browser for feature phones. My personal favourite still remains Opera Mini, and I fail to see why Sony Ericsson doesn’t include it as one of the pre-installed applications.

Like Opera Mini, NetFront 3.4 features a cursor that is used for browsing and navigating websites on the phone. This makes it very nice to browse the web, and you can even get a nice page overview, so you can easily pan and zoom. NetFront 3.4 supports CSS, HTML, xHTML, and light Java scripts. It cannot display any Flash content. Other than that, the browser offers built-in Google search functionality, RSS feed support, browsing history and bookmarks. The RSS feed support is rather nice. If the website offers a feed, you’ll be notified of this and you can then add the feed to the built-in RSS reader. You can set the reader to automatically update the feeds, and it’s even possible to display a ticker on the standby screen as a widget.

W980 comes with support for common e-mail services, such as Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail, and both IMAP and POP3 protocols. Based on my experiences with the phone, you’ll have to manually set everything up, though.

Contact management is good as always

Up to 1000 contacts and 7000 numbers can be stored on the W980. I doubt many people will exceed these memory restrictions. Along with each contact, can be stored the following information;

• Name
• Number (Mobile, Mobile (private), Mobile (work), Home, Work, Fax, and Other)
• E-mail (up to 3 e-mail addresses)
• Web address
• Picture
• Contact-specific ringtone
• Voice command
• Work information (Title, Company, Street, City, State, Zip code, and Country)
• Personal information (Street, City, State, Zip code, and Country)
• Info (a note)
• Birthday (can be added to the calendar)

I’d say that’s enough for most!

You can do backups of your contacts, send all at once, set up a business card, set up your own contact details, speed dials, and create special contact groups.

Messages are a breeze

As with just about any other Sony Ericsson phone, the W980 supports both MMS and SMS messaging. The messaging client can also be used to manage voice messages, although this is something I haven’t been able to try out.

The MMS message editor is simply brilliant. It looks fantastic with big icons that are easy to understand. These icons provide quick access to adding pictures, video and sound clips, taking a picture, recording a sound or previewing the message. You can alter basic layout and message settings in the menus. At the top right of the editor, a message file size indicator shows the current size of the message.

The SMS message editor is visually not as impressive as the MMS message editor, but its feature set is excellent. The built-in xT9 dictionary not only holds the largest collection of words on any mobile phone, it is also capable of predicting the next word based on your previous messages and use of words, making it the single most intelligent dictionary on any mobile phone. The phone supports EMS, so you can add graphical smilies, sound effects, animations and small pictures in your SMS messages. It’s capable of performing various actions, such as copying and pasting, and you’ve got a set of comprehensive settings in the menu. It also supports SMS message templates.

Don’t forget it’s also a phone…

What we’re talking about is first and foremost a phone, although one could easily be tricked into thinking otherwise. Being that it is a phone, though, it is important that it does a good job as a phone and of course at managing your contacts.

There are a few ways to call on the W980. You can dial the phone number, call a contact from the most excellent phonebook or even from phone numbers in messages. If you choose to dial the phone number yourself, W980 offers a rather nifty feature called Smart Search.

Smart Search will automatically search your phonebook for any matching information based on the key combination you’ve entered, regardless of it being a contact’s phone number or name. It’s simply ingenious and works excellently, although it tends to slow down a bit if you’ve got large amounts of contact data stored on the phone.

You can do both the standard 2G voice calls and the newer, but hardly ever used 3G video calls on the W980. Standard 2G calls are fine without being impressive. The volume during calls is more than sufficient, but the audio failed impress me. It is rather clear, though. I never got around trying out video calling, but I’d expect it to be as in any other 3G phone - mediocre quality. The network reception during the test period was excellent.

The call manager holds a total of up to 30 calls. In my opinion, the call manager could easily have been enhanced a bit. It would indeed have been nice to have added functionality, such as call length or at least information about when the call ended.
The call manager separates calls in four tabs, making everything easily accessible.

Conclusion

The W980 is somewhat an odd acquaintance - either you love it or you don’t. I’m personally quite fond of it, although it lacks WLAN, which is a very important feature for me.

The price of the W980 has come down to what I think is an acceptable price. It goes for about 260 GBP here SIM-free and unlocked. For that you get excellent audio quality, 8 gigabytes of memory, an FM-transmitter, excellent messaging capabilities and a very nice design.

The battery life is excellent. It is capable of going strong for four days per charge. I also did a music battery test on it, in which it came out excellent as well. It kept on playing for about 26 hours.

As said, the W980 is in my opinion a very good mobile phone but with some disadvantages. I wouldn’t doubt for a second that it’s going to be a very popular music phone, though.

[Review based on firmware revision R3CA033]