Home  ›  Reviews  ›

Review: Sony Ericsson W760

Form Basics Extras Wrap-up Comments  12  

Music Camera Photos/Video Browse/Customize Extras  

Browse

Using AT&T's 3G HSDPA service in Manhattan, sites such as The New York Times, ESPN and CNN.com loaded lightning fast in around five to seven seconds, depending on the density of their graphics content. Subsequent in-site pages loaded even faster, in four seconds or less.

The W760, capable of downloads at 3.6 mbps, uses the Access NetFront WAP 2.0 browser which has HTML capabilities – plenty of graphics and pictures along with the usual text menus and lists. Once on a site, however, you can change the page view to text-only. Text can be zoomed down to 50 percent or up to 200 percent in 10 percent steps, which is a good thing because it's nearly impossible to read text on the W760's small screen (compared to the new wave of large touchscreen phones) at 100 percent without squinting.

Getting to and navigating around pages is…well, a bit weird. A floating arrow cursor transforms into a flashing text cursor when positioned in a text input box, or into a pointing finger when it's placed on top of an active Web link.

Positioning the cursor on a specific spot can sometimes be like that old handheld baseball game where you try to roll little ball bearings into little indents on the bases. The cursor doesn't seem to follow any logic as you move it via the navigation array. Sometimes it automatically drops on a nearby link – and sometimes it rolls right over it. It takes some sensitive key presses to get the cursor to go where you want it to.

This cursor kookiness continues when browsing around a page. The cursor stays in one spot as you scroll up and down the page, but you can move the cursor left and right, which you will have to to read the text under the cursor.

The W760 was not yet an official AT&T model, so we could not test download speeds of online content. However, based on its speedy Web surfing, there's no reason to believe that music and video content will take much longer than any other phone in its class.

 

Customize

As noted, you can choose any song you loaded into the phone as your ringtone; just remember to change your tone when you load new songs into the phone.

You also can choose any photo you've taken or loaded into the phone as the splash screen or the screen saver. A screen saver is kind of a waste, however, since the screen goes dark in an unadjustable 30 seconds. You cannot adjust how long the screen remains backlit.

You can change the main menu from a grid to a rotating carousel to a single icon. You can download additional "themes," which of course changes how menus and lists are displayed.

You cannot change the size of the varying menu or list fonts; the numbers you "dial" are already pretty big and visible.

Related

more news about:

AT&T
 

Subscribe to news & reviews with RSS Follow @phonescoop on Threads Follow @phonescoop on Mastodon Phone Scoop on Facebook Follow on Instagram

 

Playwire

All content Copyright 2001-2024 Phone Factor, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Content on this site may not be copied or republished without formal permission.