Sony Ericsson W595 review

I'll make this clear from the beginning: I didn't expect to be impressed by the Sony Ericsson W595. Why? Call me superficial but at first glance it really doesn't inspire.

Its chunky slider appearance comes straight from the Volvo school of dull design, it's fairly chunky (14mm), features a small screen (2.2-inch) and the soft keys and direction / multimedia pad don't take advantage of the acres of ugly, unused bezel around it.

Throw in a brittle-feeling snap-on battery cover, inaccessible M2 card slot and a wobbly slider mechanism and it seemed this review could have been written before the phone was even turned on. Thankfully, however, that isn't how Know Your Mobile operates, because what lies inside is a genuinely pleasant surprise...

Switch on the W595 and you'll be greeted by a bright and vibrant QVGA display with excellent layout and icons that are eminently readable (something we don't take for granted after our experience with the Nokia 6650).

Though currently exclusive to 3 Mobile in its most fetching colour ('jungle grey'), the network has also thankfully taken something of a back seat and not customised the handset to high heaven meaning Sony Ericsson's latest menus - reminiscent of the PS3 and to be used on the eight megapixel C905 - remain intact and they are a pleasure to use.

This enjoyable functionality is greatly enhanced too with a range of sensibly made hardware choices. For example, quad-band GSM means the phone is globe trotter friendly, while 3.6Mbps HSDPA is put to excellent use on the integrated YouTube app and surprisingly decent mobile browser.

The latter may be no mobile Safari beater (would we expect it to be?) but it does scale, allow pictures to be saved and yes, there's even a copy and paste command which may be clunky, but is better than nothing.

Bluetooth is utilised to its full v2.0 glory with A2DP, a smart move missed by many a supposed 'music phone'. The choice of a 950mAh battery is excellent too, a capacity Nokia chose to power the far more multimedia heavy Nokia N96 and freed of such expectations the W595 claims of a massive nine hours of talk time and 385 hours on standby.

It would be nice to have the time to test this fully, but the few hours' worth of calls I managed over a few days barely registered a dint in the battery metre.

As we have come to expect from Walkman-branded phones, the musical element is as slick as always too, enhanced with TrackID recognition, an FM tuner with RDS, 'SensMe' technology which picks tracks based on your mood and even shake control (as seen in the new 4G iPod nano) to skip tracks - though I suspect this remains more of a novelty than something you'll utilise regularly.

Proper use is made of a fitted accelerometer as well, with the W595 switching the screen automatically and responsively between landscape and portrait modes when viewing photos, using the web browser and helpfully displaying full, widescreen video playback.

The w595 is also heavily geared towards social networking with the ability to upload pictures to Facebook, MySpace and Bebo and video to YouTube while 3 has also conveniently added native Skype, eBay and Windows Live Messenger clients - considerable extras.

Other highlights include voice dialling, a rather loud speakerphone and a rash of premium games including Pacman and Worms 2007 - though many of these are only demo versions.

Naturally enough however there are a few niggles along the way: the handset can get quite warm in use, the 2GB bundled M2 card is only there to make up for the rubbish 40MB of native memory, the 3.2-megapixel camera lacks flash and does little more than the basics and - most criminally - there's no 3.5mm headphone jack.

This should mean an immediate point deduction for any musically aspiring handset, but quite a stylish adaptor comes in the box so it is only a small rap on the knuckles.

In short the Sony Ericsson W595 is not a book to be judged by its cover. Generic it may appear, but inside it is carefully thought out and a pleasure to use. The feature set is also excellent for the price, making it hard to be critical of what is ultimately a very welcome addition to the mobile phone marketplace.