From 2005 onwards, the mobile phone community has bought over 130 million mobile phones with the “Walkman” branding from the Japanese-Swedish mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson. After nearly a year of absence, the “W” line of Sony Ericsson handsets gets resurrected – the Sony Ericsson W20.
The first half of 2010 saw Sony Ericsson furiously taking up the slack that started with its delayed XPERIA X10 which was already outdated when it finally got released in March. Over the rest of the first half, it managed to come out just a handful of mobiles phones like a couple of X10 Mini derivatives, the Hazel, Vivaz and the Aspen followed.
The brand will have to do more but at the rate it is going and the upscale models it has been dishing out, it looks like Sony Ericsson is carving an upmarket niche that could bring it out of the 5th spot contention among the Big Five players.
The once mighty Japanese Swedish phone maker hopes to remain in contention and it has a flurry of new mid-tier and upscale models lined up for release starting in the 3rd quarter of the year. It has the Yendo and a mellowed XPERIA X8 as well as the mid-tier Spiro and the Sony Ericsson W20 scheduled for release in July.
Pitched to appeal to middle-income markets with a loyalty to the Walkman mystique in mobile phones, the new W20 not only revives the W line but carries social networking features and a styling that is sure to appeal to the young crowd who mostly likely never experienced what a Walkman was about. It even comes in three body color choices – jazzy black, chacha silver and swing pink.
Mid-Tier Phone Features
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The Sony Ericsson W20 sports a portrait slider form factor which, when closed, measures 103 x 52 x 16 mm and enjoy a relatively light 115g weight. It’s a smorgasbord of radio and data connectivity starting with its quad band GSM (850/ 900/ 1800/ 1900) radio for seamless international roaming on the 2G GSM network worldwide. More importantly, it’s a dual band UMTS (900/ 2100) on the 3G network.
It comes with high speed data connectivity options like Class 10 GPRS/EDGE data speeds reaching 236.8 Kbps on 2G while 3G data connectivity gets HSDPA at 7.2 Mbps and HSUPA at 2.0 Mbps for a really fast no-wait surfing experience. If it had GPS or WiFi this would be a high ender but taking it out makes a more affordable mid-tier handset.
Nevertheless, it still gets the local data transfer and synching features we expect from a full-featured mobile phone. It has Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP for the wireless option and microUSB 2.0 for wired.
Its display and imaging features easily betrays its mid-tier qualities. It gets a 2.6 inch TFT LCD screen with a typical QVGA resolution and 256k color support. But it gets better with a scratch resistant screen material. It also comes with the usual gravity accelerometer for auto rotate viewing orientation depending on handset tilt and enables gesture control on the side.
Imaging shows no Cybershot pedigree which Sony Ericsson reserves for its “C” line of mobile phones. Here, the Sony Ericsson W20 gets a rather basic camera with a 3.2-megapixel resolution with neither autofocus nor LED flash typical of most entry level handsets.
Imaging on the Sony Ericsson W20 gets a standard 3.2 megapixel shooter without autofocus or LED flash typical of affordable handsets. It does feature geo tagging and you can easily send your shot directly to your social networking site or blog. It also has video call on 3G but has no secondary front facing camera so you will have to turn the handset around to show your face to your caller on a 3G video call. Video recording is likewise basic.
Its onboard memory is capped at a generous 260 MB and comes with microSD external memory expandability up to 16 GB. Its standard Li-Ion battery can be disappointing as it delivers only 4 hours of talk time on 2G, 3.5 hours on 3G and 340 hours of standby time on 2G from a single charge.
Remarkable Walkman Features
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The Sony Ericsson W20 won’t amount to much if not for its promise as a Walkman music phone. The branding is the only thing that puts the Sony Ericsson product line in contention with the finest music phones on the market to day, not the least of which is the iPhone which has one of the best audio reproduction qualities among mobile gadgets.
It starts with the built-in Walkman Player 4.0 which, apart from supporting MP3, eAAC and WAV file formats, can decode lossless FLAC audio compression format that preserves CD quality music at less than half the file size of WAV files.
It also decodes video files in the MP4 and H.263/H.264 codecs. The player features changeable player skins, playlist creation and sorting by artist, album and music genre. What makes it stand apart is its SensMe mood mapping feature that sorts the music in terms of current mood of the music you’re playing.
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You can also order tracks using its shake control features. There’s the TrackID features common in all Sony Ericsson music phones that allow you to sample any music you hear and the handset returns with the details of the song.
And like most other mobile entertainment phones, the Sony Ericsson W20 has a stereo FM radio with RDS. YouTube support and online audio and video streaming is also supported. The music player can work in the background while you on social networking online.
There’s a speaker phone as well as A2DP profile support that allows stereo listening over wireless stereo Bluetooth earphones. Unfortunately, the Sony Ericsson W20 misses out on what many music lovers want, and that is a 3.5mm headphone jack that lets them listen using their favourite high fidelity stereo headsets. Just about all the really good music phones have this feature.
We don’t know what Sony Ericsson is thinking taking this feature out on what it positions as a Walkman phone. You will have to get one of those aftermarket connector adapters to use as headset.
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