It's no news any more that we've been playing with one of the hotties of the season for some time now. Sony Ericsson W980 made a glorious entrance but we're yet to see about the exit. Set to top the Walkman feature phone lineup, W980 carries along 8 GB worth of storage, a 3 megapixel camera and a built-in accelerometer. The touch-sensitive keys and the latest Sony Ericsson feature phone interface add to the excitement. Still not interested? Then try to think of another music phone with a built-in FM transmitter!

2.2" 262K-color TFT LCD display of QVGA resolution

3 megapixel camera

8 gigs of onboard memory

FM transmitter

Great user interface

3G with HSDPA

External 262K-color display with a resolution of 176 x 176 pixels

Walkman 3.0 music player

Shake control

Light effects

Touch-sensitive keys

Ambient light sensor

Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP profile support

USB 2.0 connectivity

FM radio with RDS

Good battery life

Comfortable keypad

No auto focus nor flash for the camera

Inconvenient camera lens location

Shiny surface a fingerprint nightmare

Display kinda small for a high-end phone

Awkward context keys

Camera interface not user-friendly

Aiming to meet some high-end demand, Sony Ericsson W980 brings the cream of the music centered niceties of the house. The clamshell form factor and the quite eccentric features such as FM transmitter and light effects make it hard to point a finger at its main market rivals.

One suspect that comes to mind is Samsung G400 Soul. Featuring the same flip-up bodywork, it trades the FM transmitter and the large storage space for a 5 megapixel camera. You figure if it's a square deal or else. If the G400 Soul has some of those good Samsung audio quality genes, it's in for a match with Sony Ericsson W980. With no information about the cost of either at this stage, the two devices might actually end up running in different lanes pricewise.

Anyway, we think the odds with W980 are towards a hefty price tag, which opens the door to some serious smartphone competition.

Now, one last thing before we get to the point. We should warn you that ours is a pre-release unit, so some minor changes are likely before D-day. Our units was rock solid and gave us no problems at all. So, significant changes to the overall user experience are quite unlikely.

Now then, hit the jump for a thorough body inspection of the Sony Ericsson W980.

In plain words, Sony Ericsson W980 is hot. The glossy front looks terrific and gives the phone a classy look when closed. Flipping it up ruins some of the pleasure, as the round buttons on the keypad are suspiciously reminiscent of the low-end Sony Ericsson R306. Imagine how that's immensely flattering the other way around. Anyway, we are still pleased with the exterior of Sony Ericsson W980 and we are sure it will make the right impression in public.

We start inspecting the Sony Ericsson W980 flip in closed position. The front panel features the square secondary display of 262K colors and a resolution of 176 x 176 pixels. When it's off, it blends perfectly with the opaque mirror surface, so much so that you cannot even guess its exact location.

Below the secondary display of Sony Ericsson W980 there are 7 touch-sensitive keys. Those are music player controls and thanks to them and the external display you can access and navigate your music player without even opening the flip. Furthermore, the FM radio can also be operated without flipping up, thanks to a dedicated key on the side of the handset.

For the radio to work however, you need the headset plugged in. When the W980 was first announced it bragged a built-in antenna to save you the effort but this has gone missing somewhere in the pre-production phase.. Real pity, as it would have been another exotic feature for Sony Ericsson W980 owners to take pride in.

The last element of interest on the front panel of Sony Ericsson W980 is the transparent stripe at its lowest part. Using some color LEDs it creates those really cool light effects when listening to music or playing games. This is undoubtedly one useless yet cool feature that we like the Sony Ericsson W980 for.

There are two colors for the light effects - orange and white. The first one is reserved for the Walkman music player and the best thing about it is that it flashes to the rhythm of the currently playing track.

Opening the Sony Ericsson W980 reveals the 2.2" main display and the keypad, which will get its due attention later on. Above the display is the secondary video-call camera. The earpiece is on its right side. At the bottom of the flip, right above the keypad, we find the ambient light sensor.

The ambient light sensor is a nice addition to the Sony Ericsson W980. It takes care of adjusting the display brightness according to the current lighting conditions. This benefits both user experience and battery life, as reducing the brightness reduces power consumption.

The FastPort connector is placed on the left side of Sony Ericsson W980. The manufacturer has once again used a combined port for charging, data transfers and earphones. This time however, they have come up with a very practical solution for the DC charger plug. It allows you to connect a second accessory along with the charger. This can come in handy if you want to listen to the radio while recharging.

The other things worth noting on the left side of Sony Ericsson W980 are the lanyard eyelet, the LED status indicator and one of the stereo speakers.

Naturally, the other speaker is on the right side of Sony Ericsson W980. Above it is the lock slider. It is a very convenient way of avoiding some unwanted presses, especially having in mind that the touch-sensitive keys respond to any kind of touch - not just by your skin only, but any object that might turn out in your pocket.

Above the lock slider is the key used for toggling stand-by, FM radio and Music player mode for the external screen. The last control on the right side of Sony Ericsson W980 is the volume rocker.

Quite customary in a clamshell, there is nothing of interest at either the top or the bottom of Sony Ericsson W980.

The rear side of the handset is finished in some nice rubber-like material. It gives a pleasant feel and, if it wasn't for the manufacturer logo, it would have also provided a reasonable degree of slip proofing when the handset is placed on a desk for example. The thing is the logo sticks out a few millimeters causing the handset to wobble when rested on its back.

In addition to the unpleasant feel, that also means that the logo will be the first thing to experience the everyday wear and tear.

As far as the functional elements on the rear are concerned, Sony Ericsson has a 3 megapixel camera with neither auto focus nor flash. Its performance will be duly covered in the relevant chapter of this review. Next to the camera lens is the light sensor that should take care of picking the correct settings for the camera to shoot.

The camera lens itself is rather inconveniently placed exactly where your index finger would rest when shooting with the Sony Ericsson W980. Getting a comfortable hold of the handset, when taking a photo, is quite a challenge.

Opening the battery cover reveals the 930 mAh BST-38 Li-Polymer battery. As we managed to confirm it is quite a performer, allowing about 4 days of moderate use. The manufacturer claims the handset is also capable of up to 20 hours of music playback, which sounds like a quite a deal.

We are generally pleased with the build quality of Sony Ericsson W980. The handset feels and looks attractive and durable. There were no creaks or other signs to suggest problems with the day-to-day handling. It also feels great in hand and, if it wasn't for the fingerprint-magnet surface and the few ergonomic flaws we already mentioned, we would've given it a perfect mark. As the things stand now - very good should do.

The primary display of Sony Ericsson W980 is a 2.2" TFT unit of QVGA resolution and 262K colors. It is not quite what you would expect in a top-of-the-range phone in terms of size, but picture quality makes up for that. The secondary screen is also capable of showing up to 262K colors but has the modest resolution of 176 x 176 pixels.

The Sony Ericsson W980 primary display has commendable contrast and brightness levels. In addition, the long standing sunlight legibility issue with some of the Sony Ericsson handsets is at least partially resolved. With the W980 the display might not be perfectly visible in every position, but there are enough angles for problem-free working with the device.

We are not as pleased however with the external display. The shiny surface severely reduces sunlight legibility. Even indoors, its picture quality isn't as impressive. On the other hand, that's an issue with most external displays, so Sony Ericsson W980 is not to be judged so harshly.

We are rather pleased with the alphanumeric part of the keypad of Sony Ericsson W980. The keys are comfortably sized and there is more than enough space between them so you can hardly make a typo. The press feedback and touch orientation are also quite good. We are happy with the typing skills of Sony Ericsson W980.

What we don't like is the six keys around the D-pad. Those are way too tiny and very hard to use, especially if you have larger fingers.

Other than that, we have little complains. Even the touch-sensitive keys on the front panel are nice to use. We still prefer the regular press keys but those somehow managed to avoid getting on our nerves.

The backlighting of Sony Ericsson W980 is strong enough but slightly uneven. Still it is good enough for making the phone perfectly usable in the dark. Furthermore, the light effects look all the more cooler in such conditions making the handset a real eye-catcher.

A high-end phone, it is no wonder Sony Ericsson W980 has the most advanced version of the user interface of the house. The UI has the typical Sony Ericsson feature phone styling, and offers an extensive set of options and settings.

The standby screen of Sony Ericsson W980 has pretty standard looks. It shows the pre-selected wallpaper and the typical status info in the top bar. That includes signal strength, battery status, the type of currently used data transfer method (3G, EDGE, GPRS) and the icon of the currently active profile (none if General is selected). Beneath the top bar are the operator logo, the clock and date. The bottom bar is reserved for the descriptions of the functions assigned to the confirming center of the D-pad key and the two soft keys.

There are four options for the main menu layout of Sony Ericsson W980. In addition to the traditional 4 x 3 grid, the main menu now has a couple of alternative views: rotating and single icon. The last option is to use the layout of the currently selected Flash Lite theme.

There is nice icon animation, which is most obvious when one of the standard Sony Ericsson themes is applied. When you select an icon it smoothly pops up on the display for a moment before you see the next screen. Besides, there are a number of animated transition effects throughout the interface plus some eye-candy reflections.

Sony Ericsson W980 features the well-known Activity menu, which is a really handy, especially for a feature phone. It offers quick access to a number of selected functions. In addition, the Running Apps tab takes care of multi-tasking.

With Sony Ericsson W980 you can even minimize the status window when you receive files via Bluetooth and restore it through the Running Apps tab. However, this is not the case when you are sending content via Bluetooth. The other features of the Activity menu are quick access to recent events, web menu and the My Shortcuts tab, which is a user-configurable list of favorite features.

As most previous models, Sony Ericsson W980 comes with a dedicated Flight mode. It switches all transceivers off but, unluckily, requires a reboot. The other problem with the flight mode is that it can only work with a SIM card inserted, unlike some of the handsets offered by competing brands.

In general the user interface of Sony Ericsson W980 is really snappy with no lagging or holdups anywhere. We wouldn't have expected any different in a high-rated device anyway.

The phonebook of Sony Ericsson W980 has a capacity of 1000 entries with a total of 7000 phone number fields. You can opt for either the SIM contacts or the phone contacts to be default for the phonebook. Displaying both lists simultaneously is impossible but a nice option allows you to auto save to SIM any new contacts that you're saving in the phone memory.

With Sony Ericsson W980 you can choose whether to order your contacts by first or by last name. Naturally, you can search by gradual typing of the desired name.

When adding a new contact, the available details are stored in five different tabs. The first tab offers 7 phone number fields, while the second tab is for email and web addresses. The third is for assigning a picture, custom ringtone, custom message tone (now that's a new one) and a voice command. The fourth goes for postal details. The last, fifth tab, is for making an additional note and adding a birth date.

A nice feature of Sony Ericsson W980 allows you to add each birthday you enter to the calendar and set a reminder with a single click.

Sony Ericsson W980 offers spotless handling of calls. Voice quality is great on both end of a call with no interferences whatsoever.

When it comes to dialing numbers Sony Ericsson W980 really scores a point with its Smart Search dialing feature. It looks up contacts whose numbers contain the digits you have typed or whose names begin with the corresponding letters.

The Calls log application brings no news. It is divided into four different tabs, including All, Answered (Received), Dialed and Missed. When there are several calls made to or from a single contact, only the last one gets displayed.

The messaging menu of Sony Ericsson W980 is really advanced offering a lot of features and nice user-friendly interface.

On top of the usual messaging functionality, Sony Ericsson W980 offers the now-becoming-standard Manage Messages and Manage Email features, Message Categories and plenty of settings.

The Manage Messages application allows messages to be moved between the memory card and the phone memory, arranged by categories, date, size, and contact as well as other options for improved message handling.

With Sony Ericsson W980 all messages, except emails, share a common inbox. No matter of the type of the message it goes to the shared folder.

When composing a message, the character counter will alert you when you're 20 symbols short of the 160-character limit. After that it will count down the remaining symbols before eventually the "SMS 2" warning appears to indicate that you have exceeded the limit. Predictive text input goes without saying in a high-end phone like this one.

We are also pleased with the email client of Sony Ericsson W980. It supports dozens of settings and all types of encodings, some of which we are only used to seeing in more advanced messaging devices.

Sony Ericsson W980 can save attachments, no matter if they are supported or unknown file formats. Emails can also be sorted by size, date and time.

Viewing a message fullscreen and changing the font size (small, medium, large) are handy options. There is a separate Manage email application, with the same structure and features as the one for SMS.

A tad disappointing is that Sony Ericsson W980 cannot view any office documents such as Word, Excel and PDF files. All recent Sony Ericsson phones don't have that functionality and we think it's about time that they did something about it. The presence of a document viewer really earns a point here for some competing brands such as Samsung and LG.

Still, on the whole, we are happy with the messaging software of Sony Ericsson W980. Combined with a typing-friendly keypad it can really become a heavy texter's best friend.

As usual with Walkman phones, the Sony Ericsson W980 Media center is one of the highlights of the device. It allows instant access to the Photos, Music, Videos, Games and Web Feeds on the handset The current pick is highlighted and the count of stored files is displayed.

Since the Sony Ericsson W980 is equipped with a built-in accelerometer, the Media center interface rotates automatically to match the handset orientation - much like the Sony Ericsson W760. We are however not entirely happy with the accelerometer in W980 - it could've been much more responsive.

The auto-rotation also works in the Picture gallery, as well as the Music and Video players. Luckily, you can also set a fixed orientation of the Media center in case the auto rotation feature is bugging you.

The Photo gallery of Sony Ericsson W980 is definitely among the best we've found in a mobile phone. It's a convenient tool for managing a vast collection of pictures with great customization capabilities and features.

Some of those options include: one-click access to the latest snapshot you've taken, timeline view for your images and tags that can later be used for filtering. With Sony Ericsson W980 you can also mark some of your photos as favorite and make accessing them even easier through the favorite photo feed.

The Timeline view of the Camera Album displays image thumbs filtered by the month they've been taken. The currently selected photo in enlarged so you can make out what is on it without having to open it.

Another eye-pleasing feature of Sony Ericsson W980 is browsing images in fullscreen mode. When you want to go to the next in line, it doesn't simply pop up but instead slides in from left or right. Then, when exiting the full screen view of a picture, it smoothly zooms out to thumb view. That might be just visual lollipop but it does boost user experience with the gallery. The best part about it here is that it doesn't slow down the phone at all and we experienced no holdups browsing our pictures.

True to its Walkman nature, Sony Ericsson W980 really knows a nice slide show. It prompts picking a mood before you start, so it can set the proper background music and transition effects.

The only things missing are the option to pick a custom track for the slide show or export the whole thing as a video file. Still, this isn't that much of downer. Besides, you can always use the VideoDJ application for creating videos with custom transition effects between photos and background music of your choice.

Having mentioned editing, we have to say that Sony Ericsson W980 also sports the PhotoDJ image editing application. It is however downgraded from what we've seen in earlier Sony Ericsson handsets and we are not really impressed.

The Sony Ericsson W980 features the Walkman 3.0 player with all the niceties included. The player supports a vast collection of file formats and has several equalizer presets. In addition, you also get Album art and the proprietary Sony Ericsson Shake control making use of the phone's built-in accelerometer.

As with previous versions, the music player offers step-by-step filtering of the tracks you want to hear. A genuine Walkman phone, Sony Ericsson W980 features a dedicated Walkman key for accessing the music player and an icon in the main menu for the exact same purpose.

The Walkman 3.0 "Now playing" interface is simple and intuitive. The D-pad is in charge of music controls and also brings up a list of all the tracks in the current playlist or album.

As we already mentioned, Sony Ericsson W980 is also able to display Album art but you can also go for one of the alternative visualizations available. Bear in mind however, that those are squeezed in the small square that Album Art normally uses, so you should not expect miracles from them.

When you minimize the music player, the currently playing track, album and artist get displayed on the home screen with some nice graphics that perfectly blend with the Flash Lite theme used.

One of the best parts of Sony Ericsson W980 and its music player is the fact that it can be controlled without even opening the phone. The six touch-sensitive keys, plus the mode change key on the side of the handset, are all you need to operate it. This gives you a much quicker and convenient access to your music, albeit with poorer graphics.

The already mentioned light effects are another cool and exotic feature of the Sony Ericsson W980. The way they go to the rhythm of the currently played track is quite impressive.

Equalizers appear as fullscreen graphics on the Sony Ericsson W980. You can also create a custom equalizer if the presets don't do the trick.

Another highly promoted feature of the Sony Ericsson W980 is Shake control. It allows you to change the currently running track and even shuffle your entire playlist by a simple flick of the hand. All you need to do to use Shake control is press the Walkman key and shake the phone forward (for going one track forward) or backward (for going a track back). A quick succession of the two moves does the shuffle trick.

With the W980, Shake control works like a charm and really shows the use of an accelerometer. It is much more responsive as a music player control than in screen rotation. It would have been better still if the walkman key was on the side of the phone and accessible without having to flip.

The other high pitched Walkman goodie, SensMe, is a nice alternative for browsing your music collection. It gives you the opportunity to search tracks that match a certain mood instead of a specific artist, album or genre.

The interface is original and visually appealing. The tracks appear as dots placed on a coordinate system with a horizontal and vertical mood axis. Creating a playlist is as simple as circling a group of those dots. Naturally, the range of the selection can be customized.

On the negative side, setting up the mood of any given track manually is impossible. This means that if you simply copy a bunch of tracks to your Sony Ericsson W980 they won't be available for the SenseMe feature.

In order to make the SensMe work, you need to upload your music to the phone via the Sony Ericsson Media Manager software for PC with the SensMe Analysis option enabled. This however does take its time, so if you are in a rush you will probably have to live without the SenseMe until next time.

The integrated FM radio of Sony Ericsson W980 has memory for 20 stations and supports RDS.

It also sports the TrackID music recognition service, which has been around for quite some time now and doesn't need an explanation. Much like the music player, the radio can be minimized or controlled on the external screen of the W980. However when minimized, it has none of the fancy graphics the Walkman player has to offer.

When first announced, the Sony Ericsson W980 was also expected to have another cool radio feature. Back there in Barcelona, the prototypes used to have a built-in antenna that allowed listening to music without plugging in a pair of headphones. In the end, this feature was ditched, much to our disappointment.

Sony Ericsson W980 comes with a really nice video player. It supports fast-forwarding and rewinding, as well as playing clips in slow motion. It has landscape mode, as well as settings for video size like Original, Auto Fit and Fullscreen.

A really cool feature of the video player is the screenshot capability. It allows you to save a frame of video and add it to the gallery.

Finally we come to one of the most exotic and intriguing features of Sony Ericsson W980 - the FM transmitter allowing you to broadcast your favorite tracks. Those can then be picked up by any device with an FM radio receiver in the vicinity. The signal strength of the W980 is really good, even outperforming some dedicated FM transmitting devices we have seen.

The quality of the sound transmitted isn't exactly Hi-Fi but it does the job. A pleasant surprise was that it transfers the artist and the track name over RDS. The FM transmitter can be put to good use in quite a number of situations - in a car or at a party, just to name a couple.

We are very pleasued with the overall audio quality of Sony Ericsson W980. It definetely has some potential and apart from the rather high intermodulation distortion and total harmonic distortion showed very good results. Its frequency response is almost identical to that of Apple's dedicated music player - the omnipresent iPod.

You should however bear in mind that the flaws in the audio quality might be due to the fact that our unit was a beta version. Those might as well be fixed in the retail version making Sony Ericsson W980 on the better side of handsets on the market in terms of audio quality.

The Sony Ericsson W980 is equipped with a 3 megapixel camera and is capable of capturing images at a maximum resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels. It has neither auto focus nor flash and that speaks enough. Add the awkward location of the camera lens (exactly where your index finger will rest when holding the phone) and the lack of a dedicated camera key and you get (or probably won't get) the picture.

The camera interface also smells low-end, with basic graphics and limited number of features. It is nowhere near what some other Walkmans like the W910 or W890 have to offer. Real pity, as we are more than sure a decent camera interface wouldn't have been that much of an effort.

At least the built-in accelerometer of Sony Ericsson W980 is put to good use, with the handset orientation getting recorded in the camera images EXIF tags. This allows most imaging software to auto-rotate the image to its intended orientation.

The available camera settings are rather scarce too. As for additional shoot modes, you have Panorama and Burst at your disposal. There's also Night mode, Self-timer, White balance and Color effects options. And that's about it.

As far as picture quality is concerned Sony Ericsson W980 leaves us with mixed feelings. It renders colors very precisely and the photos can hardly be accused for lacking contrast. On the other hand the very aggressive noise-reduction technique that is being used eradicates all the fine detail from the pictures.

It seems that a smaller-size sensor has been used for the Sony Ericsson W980, which is producing very noisy images. In order to hide the noise the very strong noise-reduction algorithm step in action, considerably reducing the detail levels. This is a solution typically used for lower-end devices and we are rather disappointed that the Walkman flagship didn't receive better treatment.

As far as video recording is concerned, our test Sony Ericsson W980 unit went as far as QVGA at 15fps. We know better though than rushing to a conclusion about video capabilities of beta units. There have been several cases when handsets that could only reach QVGA@15fps in their prerelease stages went as far as QVGA@30fps in the retail version.

Sony Ericsson W980 supports virtually every kind of network connection that you need. HSDPA, UMTS, EDGE are all on board. That means that you can have as quick network-based internet access as your carrier can offer.

As far as close-range connectivity is concerned the Sony Ericsson W980 supports USB and Bluetooth, both v2.0. Bluetooth also comes with A2DP support, so you can enjoy your favorite tracks on a set of stereo Bluetooth headphones. Furthermore, the phone could be used as a Bluetooth modem for accessing the Internet on a PC or notebook computer.

There are two things we are missing in the connectivity options of the Sony Ericsson W980. While the Wi-Fi is still a rarity among feature phones, a memory card slot doesn't seem like that much to ask. Yeah, we know that the phone has 8GB of internal memory, but we're talking connectivity options here, not storage.

Our tests with Sony Ericsson W980 showed write speeds of about 1800 KB/s. When reading the data from it, it gets as high as 2500 KB/s. While those numbers might sound sweet to some, they are not up to what a card reader can achieve. On the other hand, they are one of the best among the 8GB phones we have tested. For example we could only achieve 730 KB/s upload and 840 KB/s download speed with a Nokia N95 8GB we had laying around our office.

Sony Ericsson W980 uses the latest 3.4 Access NetFront HTML browser. It's similar to the web-oriented Sony Ericsson K660 and G502.

Elaborate web pages are rendered brilliantly and can be displayed in both portrait and landscape mode. Fullscreen is also available and so are different zoom levels. Panning/scrolling speed is quite up to standard. Screen auto-rotation is seamless too, thanks to the built-in accelerometer.

  

The web browser offers a virtual mouse pointer, which is a real pleasure to work with. Another interesting and practical feature is the "Find on page" option. It searches the loaded web page contents and the first match is immediately listed as soon as you type a letter, much like the desktop Mozilla Firefox browser for example.

All the typical time-managing Sony Ericsson applications are aboard the W980. Those include nice calendar and alarms applications, task-manager, Notes, Timer, Stopwatch, and Calculator.

The Calendar of Sony Ericsson W980 offers the traditional monthly, weekly and daily view modes. There are also a few types of events available for setting up. Those however do not have their own unique fields for each type, so the names are all the difference. 

As far as alarms are concerned, there are five alarm slots available on Sony Ericsson W980. Each of them offers three tabs with various configurable options. You can set the alarm day and the tone, as well as the name and the picture displayed on activation.

There are two types of tasks for the task-manager: simple Tasks and Phone calls. When setting a phone call task, you can either enter the phone you have to call or you can look it up in the phonebook of your W980.

Notes are written similar to messages; T9 dictionary can be used here as well. A nice feature is the option to display notes on the Home screen. The Voice recorder has no limit to recording length, making the free memory available the only restriction.

The Calculator is the regular Sony Ericsson application.

The stopwatch and countdown timer are also the well known basic applications.

Finally, Sony Ericsson W980 also features a Synchronization application. Its purpose is to ensure seamless synchronization of your phone with SyncML and Exchange ActiveSync servers.

As far as additional applications are concerned, Sony Ericsson W980 has some to boast. There's a comparatively large number of Java-based applications in the designated folder of the organizer submenu.

We start with the AccuWeather application. It gives you up-to-date weather information for locations of interest. Current conditions overview and a three day forecast is available for a great number of cities around the world. You should bear in mind that the data is downloaded in real time so data charges may apply. Not that we can think of any other way for the application to work but we still feel a warning is due.

The Java-based Converter fills in for the absence of a native application on the Sony Ericsson W980. It works with distance, volume, weight, temperature, speed, and area. There's also a tip calculator, which allows splitting a bill, topped with a predefined rate, equally.

One of the most interesting applications that come preinstalled on Sony Ericsson W980 was the Music Mate 5. It consists of several music-centered mini applications. The first of them allows you to play music by shaking your phone. You can choose from a huge list of musical instruments for each direction.

One of the most interesting applications that come preinstalled on Sony Ericsson W980 was the Music Mate 5. It consists of several music-centered mini applications. The first of them allows you to play music by shaking your phone. You can choose from a huge list of musical instruments for each direction.

There is also a step counter on the Sony Ericsson W980. It may be set to work in the background, counting the steps you make throughout the day.

And finally, World Clock 3D allows you to spin the globe searching for a time zone. You can zoom in and out as you please. Of course you can also search by city name.

The gaming department of our Sony Ericsson W980 features three titles - Need for Speed: Pro Street, Lumines block challenge and Sudoku.

The Need for Speed: Pro Street game has cool 3D interface and is well worth giving a try (or a shake if you prefer). It can be controlled by simply tilting the phone left or right thanks to the built-n accelerometer. We however did prefer the old-fashioned (and way more convenient) D-pad control for that purpose.

The last game is a java interpretation of the world-popular Japanese game. It has nice interface and a enough difficulty levels for every taste.

As time has come for us to part with Sony Ericsson W980, we are left with quite positive impressions. The latest Walkman clamshell has a really nice feature-pack and great user interface to back it up.

The camera functionality was the only serious disappointment - the lack of auto focus and the ridiculous camera interface are anything but appropriate for a high-end such as this one.

However the Sony Ericsson W980 manages to flaunt a number of unique extras that make it stand out. The piano black front, light effects and the FM transmitter are not something to find on every other phone out there. Identity is getting more and more crucial in the overcrowded mobile market. That alone is enough for a well deserved pat on the back for Sony Ericsson W980.

The only reason for a cool-off is the lack of information about the expected price of Sony Ericsson W980. We can't help anticipating a rather hefty price tag on the new Walkman flagship. This might just be enough to throw it in the pool with some big sharks and we are not quite sure if the W980 will make it there. We do like it enough though to hope it proves us wrong.