You want to rock to the music? Well Sony Ericsson's W910i Walkman phone allows you to, quite literally, with a motion sensor 'Shake control' that can switch you from track to track at the flick of a wrist. This is one of the novel movement-based control features we can expect to see more of on forthcoming Sony Ericsson models, but besides this water-cooler gadgetry, the W910i has an impressive music mobile feature lineup.

The Sony Ericsson W910i is a wide and slim sliderphone, featuring the latest Walkman Player 3.0 software and 3G HSDPA mobile broadband technology, promising maximum data download rates of up to 3.6Mbps. That means you'll be able to download videos and full music tracks from mobile operators' entertainment portals in seconds. With a full web browser onboard, you can also enjoy surfing the internet at pace.

Naturally, the W910i packs a camera - but it is a limited 2.0-megapixel shooter, without autofocus or flash, rather than one of Sony Ericsson's Cyber-shot class affairs. A second lower resolution camera for making face-to-face 3G video calls is on the front of the phone.

The W910i is an attractive handset in both look and feel. It comes in several colour options - Noble Black, Hearty Red or Havana Gold - and has a rubberised tactile touch plus a smooth action slider mechanism.

It's a pocket-friendly 12mm thin and weighs a modest 83g, though its rectangular shaped body isn't the smallest sliderphone around, measuring 99(h) x 50(w) mm. This accommodates the ample 2.4-inch dsiplay (a 240x320 pixels 262,144-colour TFT LCD screen).

The display is large enough to demonstrate the benefits of some more of Sony Ericsson's motion sensor trickery - automatic screen orientation in media mode. Move the phone from portrait to landscape, or vice versa, and the screen automatically switches to the appropriate way up. A neat trick that saves on button pressing - and looks good too.

The screen takes up most of the front panel. Beneath it, a circular navigation D-pad - which is also marked up with Walkman player buttons - is at the centre of the W910i's controls. This is flanked by a familiar arrangement of softkeys, call/end buttons, a regular clear key and a button for the Activity Menu - an option that pulls up some useful shortcuts and features into one sub-menu. Softkeys The navigation control pad can also be user-configured for four of your own preferred fast key access from the standby display. Alternatively, you can get into the full icon-based menu system by the route one method - pressing the central menu key. The W910i's slider numberpad is straightforward - smooth and almost flush, but the large keys are raised just enough to make it good for texting.

Just above the display, two discreetly small, anonymous gaming buttons are designed for adding oomph to the gaming experience, with Sony Ericsson's W910i providing some good looking sophisticated 3D games as part of the package. In standby mode, these keys deliver another quick way into the phone's camera albums.

The W910i's camera can be switched on by a quick access key on the side too; this acts as the shutter control when snapping in landscape format, while the volume rocker keys operate the camera's 2.5x digital zoom - albeit, only when the lowest resolution VGA camera option or the video capture mode is used.

The W910i doesn't come with multi-gigabyte onboard memory; instead, you get 35MB of internal storage plus memory card expansion using Memory Stick Micro cards. A 1GB card is supplied in the box, although you can use cards of up to 4GB. These slide easily into a slot on the side of the phone.

As with any Walkman phone, the music player is the chart-topping feature. Unusually for a Walkman mobile, the quick key to fire this up is tucked out of the way, on top of the phone. It's a tiny button, with a barely visible Walkman logo on it. Its low-key presence is partly explained by its role in the Shake control option we mentioned at the beginning. Once the music player is engaged, you can flick through tracks by holding down the Walkman button while tilting the phone to the left (forwards) or right (backwards), or shaking it to activate shuffle mode.

This is a little more awkward to do than it sounds, owing to the fiddly size and position of the Walkman button - we reckon it would have been better placed on the side of the phone. A bit of vibrating feedback lets you know that the phone's registered your track flicking, but in practice the Shake control doesn't really offer any operational benefits; you'll probably make more use of the standard, easy to use navigation forward/back buttons. We expect the Shake control will see most action showing off to friends... It's always good to see a mobile maker innovating however, so hopefully Shake control Mark II might be more of a must-use function than a gimmick.

As for the music player, it's what's in the grooves that counts and the Walkman player puts in an excellent music player performance. It has a very intuitive user interface, supports album cover art, and offers a range of options; tunes are organised by artist, albums, tracks, genres, and year. Playlists can be created, and there are also separate options for Audio books and Podcasts. Another bit of Sony Ericsson innovation is an alternative method of creating playlist - the SensMe option.

SensMe is a way of creating playlists from tracks by mood. Using Sony Ericsson's Media Manager PC software supplied, you can sync tracks to the phone with various SensMe mood rankings. These are plotted against two axes - Fast/Slow on the vertical and Sad/Happy on the horizontal. Individual tracks are placed according to their ratings, so you can select tracks by mood - for example, a slow sad song, a not so slow but happy-ish track, or a full-on 180bpm grin-maker.

While it offers a bit of novelty, in reality its usefulness will be limited for most people - though it could find its niche in soundtracking high-tempo exercise sessions.

The Walkman player produces excellent sound quality, delivering a good tonal range including plenty of bass whack through the supplied earphones. The earphones are better quality than most regulation 'phones boxed with standalone MP3 players, although you can also choose to add your own earphones via a 3.5mm jack socket on the Sony Ericsson handsfree headset's in-line microphone.

Again, Sony Ericsson hasn't put a 3.5mm jack in the phone itself, instead using a more bulky dual role charger/headphone connector on the side, with the two-piece supplied headset offering the headphone upgrade option. Alternatively, a set of stereo Bluetooth wireless headphones could be used.

The W910i comes with packaged Sony Ericsson PC Suite and Media Manager software software on CD for syncing organiser functionality with your PC, and organising music tracks and other media content.You can use the supplied USB cable, and can also drag and drop tracks or other content over, using the phone in mass storage mode. Bluetooth can we used for swapping or streaming files too.

In addition to the music player, the W910i also features an FM radio with RDS; as usual, you'll have to plug in the headset (its aerial) to use it. TrackID, Sony Ericsson's clever music identification software, is included too.

While the music player gets a big thumbs-up, the camera is quite limited. Knowing what Sony Ericsson offers on its Cyber-shot range, it does feel a bit of a letdown to have a standard camera on what is an otherwise attractively featured handset. That's not to say picture quality is awful, just average for a limited 2-megapixel camera without autofocus or flash (you can see more details of the camera and images taken with the phone in our article Sony Ericsson W910i Camera Samples). Good lighting conditions ensure good colour rendition and a reasonable amount of detail, though low-light shooting can be poor, with picture noise affecting images.

Video quality on this device is limited too, offering maximum QVGA quality recorded at 15 frames per second. Playback of pre-recorded clips though is much healthier, playing at a smoother 30fps.

Sony Ericsson also includes the option to upload pics or videos over the air straight to an online Blogger blog, and the W910i will automatically set one up for you should you wish it to do so.

You can visit your Blogger account directly from the phone's browser, which provides access to the full internet. The Access NetFront Web Browser produces a good mobile browsing experience, while the W910i also supports RSS feeds to keep you regularly updated from your favourite websites or blogs without having to browse through every site. You can set this to provide a standby screen ticker too.

The W910i also supports email, and there's the usual supply of Sony Ericsson organiser functionality on the phone (contacts, calendar, notes and to-do lists can be synced with a PC using the supplied software). There are three games loaded onto the W910i. The V-Rally 3-D driving game is particularly impressive graphically, while there's a Marble Madness game that ingeniously uses the motion sensor technology inside to control marbles in the game.

Sony Ericsson has included some of its familiar additional features, such as its PhotoDj, VideoDJ and MusicDJ editing and composition software onboard, a number of voice control options, a voice recorder, an audio book reader and an updated version of its Music Mate app (that also uses motion sensor tech for some options).

Sony Ericsson claims the battery life on the W910i will yield up to 9 hours talktime on GSM networks or 3 hours 30 minutes on 3G. Standby time for both 3G and its quad-band GSM coverage is quoted at up to 350 hours. The music player can eke out up to 20 hours of tune-playing between charges, although using other functions extensively will eat away into all these estimated figures. Voice call quality was high class on the phone, and produced clear and loud audio quality on both ends of the line.

The Sony Ericsson W910i is more evolutionary than revolutionary for the Walkman phone range. It doesn't have it all in terms of features; its camera could be much improved, the connector could be better placed, and its motion sensitive functions could be utilised more for the music player to reduce the 'novelty gimmick' factor. There's no smartphone OS powering it or Wi-Fi connectivity, though 3G HSDPA does give a fast access mobile network alternative. Overall though, W910i is a very attractive slimline 3G handset that offers plenty of phone in a tidy package. And when it comes to handling tunes, its headline Walkman music player produces an excellent audio performance that will satisfy most people buying it for its audio credentials.

Sony Ericsson W910i technical specifications