Sony Ericsson W760a

The W760i features a classic Sony Ericsson slider design that's sure to catch a few eyes on the street. The curved edges and clean lines make for a very attractive phone with some unique style touches. In particular, we liked the textured material on the bottom end of the phone and the shiny metal skin below the camera lens. Three color versions are available fancy black, rocky silver and intense red.

The black model, which we reviewed, features a bright yellow stripe across the battery cover. Though it gives the W760i a faint bumblebee impression, we approved of its overall look. At 4.1 inches tall by 1.9 inches wide by 0.6 inch deep, and weighing 3.5 ounces, the W760i is compact and lightweight yet still has a comfortable solid feel in the hand. The slider mechanism is sturdy you can open and close the phone with one hand, and it clicks firmly into place on either end.

The 2.25 inch display is nothing short of excellent. With support for 262,144 hues, it is bright and vibrant with an intense color resolution. Everything looks great, from the easy to use menus to the graphics and photos.

You can adjust the brightness and choose from a selection of menu styles. In the past, Sony Ericsson has stumbled when designing navigation controls.

Usually this has happened when the company's product design team tried to be too creative.

But with the W760i we were glad to see that Sony Ericsson kept things simple. The four ways toggle and surrounding buttons are spacious and tactile and we rarely had a problem navigating through menus and selecting options.

The four way toggle and central OK button double as music player shortcuts, and you can set the toggle to give one touch access to an additional four user defined functions. Though we'd prefer dedicated music controls, such an arrangement is common on other Walkman phones. The two soft keys have tactile ridges, and we were glad to see Sony Ericsson break from another tradition by providing dedicated Talk and End or power buttons. Both controls are intuitive and, in an unexpected touch, they're surrounded by small speakers for the music player.

Our only complaint with the W760i's controls is that the Clear key and the secondary shortcut button are a bit crowded and they lack any definition. On a couple of occasions we mistakenly hit the End key when we meant to press the Clear button. As is the case with most slider phones, the W760i's keypad buttons are hidden by the sliding face. Of course, that also means that they're completely flush, but they make up for it by being relatively large. When texting or dialing we didn't have any miss dials. What's more, the backlighting is bright, and the numbers on the keys are big.