The new Sony Walkman phone, the W705, has a definite touch of glitz and bling about it, with the front silver highlighted by gold. It could be extremely tacky, but surprisingly, it’s not.
As well as controls for the music, as with all Walkman phones, there’s also a feature called ShakeIt which will appeal to those who love to go out dancing, and this is a handset that utilises the company’s SensMe method of arranging music by mood, rather than by genre. It can be confusing at first, but in an odd sort of way makes sense after a while. However, if you’re feeling down, it’s easy to indulge yourself with all those sad songs you have stored –and there’s a memory card, so room for plenty of material.
Sony Ericsson has done something very different with texting on this handset, too. On receipt of a text the user is given a variety of reply options, ranging from animation to sound clip and points in between. This is a very clever idea that will appeal to the young, who are the main audience for this phone, anyway.
The bad points? It can take a long time, up to two minutes, for the stored music to show on the screen, for no obvious reason, when turning on the phone. Also, the Media Manager software only works with PCs, not Macs, a rather disturbing oversight that could easily have been corrected. The W705 does have BBC iPlayer, but there are many reports of people unable to get it to work.
