Price dependent on contract
Although the W995 is being billed as a Walkmen phone, its music playing features are far from being its most interesting attribute.
Probably this slider handset’s strongest asset comes in the form of its 8.1-megapixel camera, the quality of which makes you wonder why the W995 wasn’t placed under Sony’s Cyber-shot marque.
A somewhat flimsy flip-out rest that enables the phone to stand either horizontally or vertically, hints at the phone’s other main calling card, video playback.
While the 2.6-inch screen isn’t the biggest, the QVGA 320x240 resolution screen is still sharp enough to make watching a full-length flick a pleasurable experience.
Wi-Fi and GPS are built in, as is a preloaded version of BBC’s iPlayer, which offers both catchup TV and live streaming
Somewhat surprisingly, the W995, is the first Walkmen phone to feature a regular 3.5mm headphone jack, letting you plug your favourite cans in without fuss.
As you’d expect, with a Walkmen phone, sound quality is top notch, with a nice bonus of some decent external stereo speakers thrown in the box for playing your music out load.
While there’s only 118MB of built-in memory, the phone comes bundled with an 8GB Memory Stick Micro card that can be expanded up to up to 16GB to store your tunes and movies.
It may not have the versatility of the all-singing all dancing smartphones that seem to be everywhere right now, what Sony’s latest Walkman phone does, it does supremely well.