W890 supports lots of common audio codecs, such as M4A, MP3, AAC, AAC+, E-AAC+, WAV & WMA. Equalizers can be set to enhance your music and with 4 presets and the option to manually set an equalizer you should have more than enough to fiddle around with here. If you decide to minimize the Walkman player while listening to music, the song information will be printed on the wallpaper of the phone. Furthermore, when you play your music on W890, the keypad illuminates according to the mood of the song. That looks very neat!
The audio quality on W890 has to be among the best I’ve heard. The bass level is nice and deep, and the sound is generally loud and clear. For me, the W890 audio quality is definitely better than the W910’s audio quality.
It is possible to change the visualization to either display to album cover or one of five different visualizations (waves, Walkman lines, inner twirl, circles, album lines) or no visualization at all. Other features include the ability to repeat and randomize the song tracks on your play list.
One of the features the W880 lacked was an FM-radio tuner. Sony Ericsson has fixed that with the W890 and also added the addition of RDS so you won’t have to bother about losing the radio signal. Up to 20 radio frequencies can be saved automatically and are then displayed in a list view for easy browsing. W890 displays standard radio station info texts. If you like the song on the radio, yet you don’t know what the name of it is, you can use the TrackID service to record a short sample and have it sent to Gracenote’s huge database to receive an answer only seconds later. If your operator supports it, there will also be a link to buy the song.
The Sims on your phone
Three games are bundled with the W890: Lumines Block Challenge, Sims 2 and Tennis Multiplay. The last one is a 3D game and is probably also the best of the bunch, but let’s have a look at them all.
Lumines Block Challenge is a puzzle game, where the object of the game is to match up falling blocks and create patterns. It might take a while to fully understand the purpose of the game, but it’s actually a pretty decent game when you figure out how to play it.
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Sims 2 is a mobile version of the extremely popular ‘The Sims’-series games. It actually works out all right on the phone but it is very limited compared to the computer / console versions. In the mobile game you can only do a limited amount of purchases and upgrades before there’s nothing more to buy or more people to meet. This is a bit of a let-down as it’s a very nice simulator game. The graphics is pretty simple but far from bad and the gameplay is quite good.
Tennis Multiplay is the only 3D game on the W890. It’s probably the best tennis game out there for mobile phones and it’s really a fun game! You can play tournaments and singles in order to upgrade your player’s skills. If you want to improve your gaming skills you can also do a few training sessions. The graphics looks quite good and it’s easy to play the game.