I've been looking forward to doing this for some time now! 
I'll be comparing various aspects of these phones.....the W960 from my personal experience and the iPhone 3G from the previews of course!
So here goes...
Design
The new iPhone 3G model isn't very different design wise, although a tad thicker than the original. Apple's traditional simple and clean look makes it all the more appealing. The original iPhone had great build quality so am assuming the iPhone 3G will be as good, if not better. First impressions of the W960 are excellent and you really feel you're holding something exclusive in your hands...the combination of a black casing and white edging along its sides looks pretty good. Sony Ericsson phones have great build quality and the W960 is no exception. But the Apple iPhone wins hands down in this aspect. That's not to say the W960 isn't good enough. Its a pretty stylish looking device, the glossy front and sporty black and white look assures that. Its just that when compared with the iPhone, the WOW! factor is missing
Hardware
The Apple iPhone 3G boasts of features like the famed Multi-touch screen, Accelerometer, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, A-GPS and HSDPA which does dwarf the W960. The W960's 2.6 inch screen looks miniscule as compared to Apple's generous 3.5 inch screen. The only advantage the W960 has over the iPhone is the Keypad, but more on that later.
So, the iPhone wins this mini-comparison too!
Interface
The Apple iPhone runs on a stripped down version of Mac OS X. The interface is very impressive with nice effects here and there which do enhance visual appeal. The multi touch screen coupled with the finger friendly interface makes the iPhone a joy to use.
The W960 runs on UIQ 3.0, Symbian OS v9.1. The UIQ interface has been more refined and its a lot faster as compared to its predecessors. Its still not as breezy as the iPhone though. The UIQ implementation is still rather complex, so new users will probably have to spend quite some time to get used to it. Some settings are buried under scores of menus, which really can get annoying at times.
Camera
Why the camera on the iPhone 3G hasn't been upgraded is still beyond me. It still features a 2 megapixel fixed focus camera. Its just basic, point and click, so not much to write about. There'ss till no video recording though, which is disappointing.
The W960 packs a 3.2 megapixel camera with Autofocus. The pics are almost as good as the K800 camera, so it'll do the job in most situations. It also features a double led flash for clicking pictures in dim lighting conditions and a secondary VGA camera for video calling. The W960 records video at QVGA 15fps....the specs aren't really stellar, but its good enough to view on the W960 screen.
This one was a pretty one sided contest. So no prizes for guessing which one's the winner. The W960 wins this round with ease!
Video
The Apple iPhone is really the one to get if you're planning to watch high quality videos on your phone. The large 3.5 inches screen is a big plus. That with the fact that Apple fully supports H.264 video definetely improves the entire viewing experience!
The W960 on the other hand features a much larger screen as compared to stndard Sony Ericsson feature phones as well as newer UIQ handsets such as the G900/G700. It supports video playback at 30 frames per second, which is the same as TV quality. However H.264 video support is still not properly implemented in Sony Ericsson UIQ smartphones.
The iPhone has the upper hand when it comes to video playback!
Music
Now this is the area which will draw most of the attention. With both the manufacturers being famous for their music oriented products, Apple taking the world by a storm with its sleek and simple iPods and Sony Ericsson famous for its Walkman series mobile handsets, the comparisons are inevitable.
The iPhone has a great music player, pretty simple and easy to use. The CoverFlow interface works on the iPhone is a similar way to how to works in iTunes: the album art is displayed and you can scroll side to side through the covers to select albums or songs. Pretty neat I thought!
Well that was before I had used the W960.
The W960 features the Walkman Touch Player. This is the best music player in a mobile phone ever! With 11 equalizer presets including the famed 'MegaBass', dedicated touch sensitive music controls, this really is the best music oriented handset out there! It features advanced track filtering with artist, album, compilations, playlists and auto playlists, ratings and even moods available as options, which is quite impressive. One of the coolest things about the player is the option to scroll through your tracks using the side Jog Dial. The player also offers a sleep timer allowing it to turn off automatically after a specified period. But its the addition of several fullscreen background visualizations that really catch your eye.
There's a choice of five and they change in speed and patterns according to the mood label your current track has.The Sony Ericsson wired in-ear stereo headset provides a very good listening experience, sadly the same can't be said about the headphones bundled with the iPhone. The W960 also supports A2DP, so you can use any stereo Bluetooth headset to listen to music wirelessly, which is something that the iPhone fails to offer.
Steve Jobs claimed that the iPhone 3G will have better audio than the original. However, there doesn't seem to be any information available just yet about the audio that would indicate any improvements.
The verdict: W960 beats the iPhone hands down!
Messaging
The iPhone lacks a physical keypad so you'll have to use the on screen keyboard, which is pretty good if i'm honest. The iPhone still lacks MMS support though, which is surprising.
The messaging department is the strength of any Sony Ericsson smartphone, the W960 being no exception. The W960 supports SMS, EMS, MMS, and Email. You can enter text using the hardware keypad or the virtual on-screen QWERTY keyboard or simply handwrite with the stylus on the touchscreen display.
So, the W960 gets a thumbs up!
Web Browsing
Using the Safari web browser on the Apple iPhone is an out of the world experience. You can see the entire web page on the iPhone screen! Now how cool is that! :D This is where the advantage of having a multi-touch screen kicks in. You can double tap to zoom in, pinch ur thumb and finger on the screen to zoom out, use two fingers and spread them apart to strech the image and so on....which really is cool!
I tried google maps and it was a joy to use.The W960 comes with Opera 8.65 web browser, which is very good in its own right, but as others have pointed out before, the bar for mobile web browsing has been raised since Opera was first created for UIQ. However I must add that browsing the web on the W960 is a great experience and I faced no problem whatsoever. UIQ users will be waiting for the Opera 9.5 which promises to improve the overall browsing experience on UIQ handsets.
The iPhone is definetely the one to browse on!
Third Party apps
The Apple iPhone is capable of running web based apps, and as there are more and more developers lining in to develop for the iPhone, am sure users will have a whole lot of options soon. However what intrigues me is the absence of Java support.
Steve jobs has been quoted as saying,
Java's not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It's this big heavyweight ball and chain.
I couldn't disagree more!
The W960 runs on Symbian OS, so there are definetely more third party apps available for it at the moment. It supports java too, so you have thousands of java apps to choose from too.
Verdict: Even though there are a lot more web based apps available for the iPhone now, the W960 still has a lot more otions to choose from. So my vote goes to the W960.
Which one is more 'Smart' ?
Apple is promoting the iPhone 3G as a business device as well, but the iPhone cannot be called a smartphone, atleast not if you go by conventional definations. A smartphone needs to allow users to extend the functionality of their phones. Hence it needs to allow third party apps to be installed, which sadly isn't possible on the iPhone.
This will be one of the main reasons which may deter power users from choosing the iPhone 3G over a....lets say WM or Symbian OS device. However, am not one of those who'll write off the iPhone. No....not yet anyway. The iPhone is a great innovation, it has truly raised the bar for touchscreen devices. But the fact is that its still undeserving of being called a smartphone. However, its not the end of the road though and I'm hoping that future versions will do justice to the 'smart' tag.
The W960 enables a whole lot of third party apps to be installed, so its truly a smartphone.
Conclusion
Both phones have their positives as well as negatives. So ultimately it boils down to what you want from your device. The W960 has a great mix of business and multimedia features, which makes it a very good handset indeed. The Apple iPhone on the other hand is a very good multimedia phone which has truly revolutionized the mobile phone market.
5 comments:
Had a look at the iPhone today. Was a really nice user interface, and even I would buy one, but the deal breaker for me was the fixed focus camera which I'm sure they imported from some time before 2002, and the lack of select, copy, paste support... more annoying than you might first think because if it "autofixes" an entire word incorrectly, you have to backspace over the whole word (or at least back to the first borked letter) instead of a more intuitive drag-to-select, then delete.
I totally agree... it doesnt make sense that you cant copy/paste text or even photos... I turned off the auto-correction feature which sucks..
Another big turn-off of the iphone is the incapacity to run several appz at the same time.. you can't load a msn clone appz while you go surf on the buggy safari.. it's one application at a time :( :( I think that ANY Os would work just as fast as the iphone if it'd allow just one appz at once... So it doesnt make impressed of "osx" at all..
You can't use your iphone's connection on your laptop (which you can do from most Windows device) ..
I'm also not impressed by the battery.. used to be better on the v2.. even after turning off blue, wifi, 3g and brightness... it justs doesnt last long
I totally agree with you both.
@riverbelle
the lack of multitasking and copy/paste capabilities is the most annoying factor. Apple is wrong to market it as a 'smartphone'
I would have to disagree with the browsing experience going in favor of the iPhone. I have a w960 and I have used the iPhone multiple times and the iPhone has a big drawback when it comes to browsing and that is that you cannot cut an paste text, this is extremely annoying! I use my w960 for all occassions like looking up a movie time or searching the web for some information that I might want to send to someone and therefore I love t be able to select the text from the website and then paste it into a message to send to someone else without having to memorize the information and then replicate it back into a message. This is the same for messaging as well, iPhone does not let you copy and paste text, and you cannot view word and excel documents either on the iPhone which you can on a w960.
Riverbelle brought up a good point to about running multiple apps, it never occurred to me. I always listen to music search the web and play games at the same time by just switching around lol.
IPhone still has a long way to go until it offers all the features of the w960. I think the w960 would be more of a competitor if it had a big screen like the iphone and h.264 capabilities.
@Sam
I agree with you on the copy/paste thing...but overall...the W960 browser is no match for Apple' safari browser. its just too awesome!
edit: Opera has release 9.5 version for UIQ3....so the gap has become less, but apple still has the uppr hand :)
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