The wallpapers are also Flash-based so if you have your music playing, the song details will automatically be displayed on the wallpaper.
The operating system in W890 is the OSE-based A200 developed by Swedish Enea. A200 is the most fully featured software platform in any Sony Ericsson feature phone and it can be updated with many more features than it currently holds. This is also planned to be done in the future (TV-out, WLAN and advanced media handling) but for now the prime focus is to get rid of bugs and optimize its performance. While W890 feels like a stable product there are a few minor bugs reported. I have however not experienced any problems with W890 during the test period whatsoever.
People upgrading from older Sony Ericsson phones may notice that the back-key has disappeared. This is due to the new software platform based on a 3 soft keys. The left key acts as an option-key, the middle key acts as the action-key for confirming actions, while the right key acts as the back-key.
Another thing people will notice is that there are now two dedicated call keys to handle incoming and outgoing calls. The activity menu short cut key is still present and takes you to Sony Ericsson’s unique activity menu with short cuts to various features, new events, running applications and your web short cuts and bookmarks.
Very smart phone-ish
As former mentioned, W890 offers an extensive menu of activities. This is actually more advanced that what most smart phones has to offer, and Sony Ericsson has to be given credits for this brilliant multi-menu. With support for multiple applications running at once, we’re getting more and more close to entering the smart phone-sphere.
W890 is one of the first Sony Ericsson phones to include positioning services. This means that Google Maps Mobile is included and so is positioning software for use with extra GPS accessories. Google Maps Mobile works brilliantly on the W890 because of the 3G / HSDPA connections available with W890. This removes any lags when loading maps in the application. One must be careful when using this application and the positioning services in general as they do include large data transmissions.
Only one Java application comes with the W890. It is called Music Mate 4 and is a music composer application. You can choose from a large number of musical instruments, beats and tunes - once you’re done you can start making music! Here is where I miss the accelerometer in the W890. W910 - a music phone with a built-in accelerometer - has also got Music Mate 4 pre-installed and the application works with the accelerometer in W910 so you can swing your phone around and it’ll make sounds and tunes according to what direction you move the phone in.
I think a weather application and possibly also the Gmail Java client would be very nice to see pre-installed on the W890.
The 11th menu icon holds the organizer menu. This is where you’ll find the file manager, alarms, applications, video calls, calendar, tasks, notes, remote synchronization, timer, stopwatch, a simple calculator and a code memo application that acts like a password-protected storage of personal information.
The file manager holds all files on the phone. It is separated into 8 folders according to the content, plus an extra one called ‘Other’ for any files that don’t fit into the other folders. You have several ways of viewing your content in the file manager, and it is possible to perform various actions as well. You can manage your files, send them (picture message, email, blog or via Bluetooth), you can print your photos, you can rename, delete and mark files. The file manager is Sony Ericsson’s feature phones is without doubt one of the best on the market and is on par - and in some cases even better - with the standard file managers on most smart phones.
You can set up to 5 different alarms and it is possible to make them recurrent, meaning that you can set them to alarm on a number of repeating days. Alarms can be saved with notes, different alarm signals and even an alarm picture to scare you out of bed!
The calender application works a treat and pretty much does what it’s suppose to do. You can view your calendar entries by date, week or month view. Appointments are created with information about the subject, start time, date, duration, location & description. It is also possible to set a reminder. If it’s a recurrent appointment, you can set that as well.
You can set up a remote synchronization account on the phone. The phone supports two account types - SyncML and Exchange ActiveSync. I personally do not have any accounts, but it is said to work fine.
Tasks & notes can be created on the phone. Notes can also be shown in standby which works really nice. Tasks work as you’d expect. Likewise, there is nothing spectacular about the timer and stopwatch feature.
The calculator is very simple to use and can display up to 9 digits. It can multiply, divide, substrate and add numbers. It can also perform percent calculations.
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