SONY ERICSSON HAD been churning out tasty, MP3-playing mobiles for ages, before the iPhone came along and drizzled on its chips. The W960i is where the fight-back begins. Let’s start with a minor negative point: The touchscreen is near-useless. For practically every function, you’ll use the scroll wheel on the side and/or the phone keypad, because the screen is slow to respond and requires a stylus much of the time.

Feature creature
On the plus side, with 8GB of storage and really meaty Megabass sound, the music player is arguably better than the iPhone’s. The W960i is also Symbianed up and bedecked with functions on top of the trademark Walkman. You can open Office documents and PDFs, there’s Wi-Fi, a pretty good browser, push email and a 3.2-meg camera – it’s no Cyber-shot, but it’s much better than most we’ve seen. The usual caveat for the current wave of do-it-all phones applies: if you use all the functions, your battery will die like a dog in a hot car.

The problem here is that, if there’s a single thing the iPhone has really changed, it’s that mobiles are no longer just about features: they’re about feel, and the W960i feels, in fact, a little plain. Practically all it does takes longer than is acceptable to a busy fella like you, from deleting multiple texts to making playlists, to navigating menus.

If you want a phone to do everything short of ironing your kecks, this fits the bill. If you want one that responds in a flash, keep looking.

LOVE Superb music player. Loadsa features.

HATE Slow touchscreen. Sluggish.

WE SAY A nearly great Walkman smartphone that’s just that bit too slow to really thrill.

3 stars
SCREEN 2.6-inch touchscreen
CONNECTIVITY 3G. Wi-Fi. A2DP Bluetooth
CAMERA 3.2-meg
STORAGE 8GB
BATTERY Three hours talk/300 standby (3G)
SIZE/WEIGHT 109x55x16mm/119g