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Review: Sony Ericsson W760

Form Basics Extras Wrap-up Comments  12  

Music Camera Photos/Video Browse/Customize Extras  

Apps

Voice control in the W760 is stripped to its essential elements – no gimmicks here. You can record names for voice dialing and, for hands-free use, record "answer" and "busy" voice answer commands and the names of callers in your contact list so you know who's calling without fishing the phone out of your pocket. All of these functions require only your voice recorded, no special training. Voice dialing and the voice ID worked fine, but telling my Bluetooth earpiece to "answer" the call didn't work.

You also get a few A-GPS location-based services, primarily Google Maps, along with Wayfinder, a voice-prompted turn-by-turn navigation application, and Tracker, an athletic tool to time or measure distance running or exercise.

Google Maps, which can toggle between map and satellite view, wasn't as precise on the W760 as it is on some other phones. It often placed My Location way outside the 900 meter range indicated on-screen, more like 1500 meters. However, searches for nearby McDonald's or Staple's produced a list of locations, which include address, phone number and directions to and from, and other details such as store hours or menus, if available, in less than 10 seconds. Since the W760 doesn't have a touchscreen, you have to use menu choices and the keypad to zoom in and out on the map.

Bluetooth

Pairing with a variety of earpieces and stereo headphones, both 2.1 and 2.0, proved no problem for the W760, which is a 2.0 device.

Syncing with a PC was largely uneventful other than the usual inexplicable (to me, anyway) doesn't work/oh, wait, it works now trouble with entering PIN numbers into the phone and establishing the link. Once successfully paired, pictures flowed easily from phone to PC with only a couple of minor hiccups – a couple of photos just refused to go all the way through.

As with all data transfers, it's easier to use the included USB cable.

Clock

You can choose a large or small time display; the small clock display puts the time in bright orange on the bottom right of the home screen along with the date; large, the time is splayed across the screen but in a more muted orange with the date in the same small bright orange font right below.

In all other functions or apps, the time gets relocated to the top icon line, to the left of the battery meter.

There also are a couple of world clock applications included. Standby World displays a rotating series of clocks from three different cities of your choosing, against either a night starry sky or daylight, depending on the local conditions. World Clock 3D displays a globe; scrolling left and right highlights each successive longitudinal time zone or focuses in on a specific city.

Multimedia

The W760 I got had six games pre-loaded, including moldy oldies such as Asteroids and Breakout. None utilized the A-B buttons on the top of the phone. There's also MusicDJ, which lets you compose your own synth music.

Also included is an FM radio, which works only when the headphones, which must act as an antenna, are attached. Reception was strong, clean of static and consistent, even for somewhat distant stations. Surrounded by skyscrapers in mid-Manhattan, I was able to pull in stations from western New Jersey, a trick many car radios have trouble with.
At press time, our test model didn't support any of the AT&T Wireless subscription streaming video or audio content.

Sync

Included with the W760 is a USB cable and the Sony Ericsson PC Suite, required for syncing calendar, contacts, email accounts and other PIM settings. The disc also contains the aforementioned Media Manager for syncing multimedia content.

It is recommended that you use Media Manager for transferring and syncing music and photos. The problem is that Windows Media Player is – and I can't believe I, a dedicated user of iTunes, is saying this – just easier to use than Media Manager.

For instance, after importing tracks from iTunes, Media Manager refused to display a song list. All you get is a list of artist folders, which means you have to open and burrow through these folders and subsequent album folders to transfer individual tracks.

As soon as you move a track or tracks for transfer, the sync begins immediately. You can still move tracks during this sync, but it's hard to get a sense of how much space you have left to fill. What would help is Windows Media Player's shuffle auto fill option.

Once connected, both the PC Suite and the Media Manager recognize the phone after a few seconds and you can proceed with syncing. There are no clear instructions in the slim instruction manual for how you transfer varying elements; veteran Windows users should have no trouble, but it'll take some hit-and-miss guesswork (and maybe a little Windows-cursing frustration) for more casual users.

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