Sony’s heavyweight W960 Walkman bruises into the ring: iPhone beware

Partnering up with the new K850 Cyber-shot to tag-team the iPhone is Sony Ericsson’s new king of the hill Walkman, the W960. Touting 8GB of on-board storage, a 2.6″ touch-screen interface for the Symbian OS, a 3.2MP-camera, wi-fi, and the new HBH-DS200 Bluetooth Stereo headset in the box, this is one very serious music-playing phone.

At 109 x 55 x 16mm, the W960 is slightly shorter but thicker than the iPhone, and also slightly lighter at 119g. Its 240 x 320 pixel QVGA screen with 262,000 colours lags behind Apple’s offering, but W960’s camera is significantly better than the 2MP unit in the iPhone. Wi-fi or 3G web browsing is done on the very capable Opera Mini browser. Music transfer is done over USB 2.0 via the supplied cable.

For more high-rez pics of the W960, and info on Sony’s all-new Media Manager PC app that accompanies its new Walkman handsets, hit the jump.

The Media Manager app replaces Sony’s old Disc2Go software, and boasts a number of new features. Among these is SensMe, which picks up data about genre, beats-per-minute and other track info and uses it to create playlists of tracks that relate to your mood — or at least, that’s the idea. We think that it’s a slightly missed-trick that this software is PC-only, because to add Apple support, Nokia-style, would have been a nice way to wave a couple of fingers at the iPhone.

Other key features in Media Manager include a new feed manager for tracking and copying podcasts to your Walkman; a simple-to-use drag ‘n’ drop interface for music transfers; and automated creation of playlists depending on your specifications. Want a one-hour playlist for a train journey? The idea is that you can set that up and copy it over with a few simple clicks.

Back on the W960, other key specs include: a jog-dial wheel as well as the touch-screen and keypad (three ways to interact? So much for ‘clean’ interface design); RSS feed reader, MP3/ AAC ringtones, FM radio with RDS, support for Microsoft ActiveSync push-email… but video/ picture blogging are listed as unsupported. That seems a bit odd considering the phone has wi-fi connectivity — and a nice camera. However, with the Symbian OS you’ll be able to install apps to do this kind of thing yourself.

Overall, this seems like a nice riposte to both Nokia’s recent Nseries offerings. And while it may not quite match the iPhone in some areas (most notably the screen), the W960’s Walkman branding, Symbian fundamentals, and high feature set seem likely to catch plenty of attention on the high street when it lands later this year.

Update October 22nd: Mobile Review has just posted the first hands-on review of the W960i. Click here to read more.

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