Customer Reviews

Sony Ericsson W760a Phone, Black (AT&T)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

UPDATE: I've had the w760a for nearly two years now (started using it in September 2008). For a while I kept seeing more and more glitches popping up with it (calls not staying remembered in the phone memory, random shut-offs, calls going to voice-mail before ever ringing). Based on other reviews I've read, these are common glitches and not limited to just me.

However, I installed a software update from the Sony Ericsson website in October 2009 and most, but not all, of the glitches have since gone away.

One major glitch remains: calls from numbers not stored in my address book (i.e. calls from anyone that I don't know, or new phone numbers), don't stay remembered in the calls log. As such, if I miss a call from a new number, that's it: I can't call them back. I don't have their number.

Similarly, when I dial new numbers, they don't stay remembered in my call log.

This is a pretty annoying glitch and makes having this phone almost akin to having a 1970s landline that doesn't have caller i.d. or a screen.

But the phone's good overall. It has excellent call quality and a number of nice perks, such as a built-in FM radio, a scheduler and tasks feature, a decent camera (3.2MP), and a sturdy design.

I wish the interface were slightly faster and perkier to respond to commands (the w760a's predecessor, the w580, was much quicker in this regard), but this phone is definitely sturdier than most on the market.

If you're looking for a reliable, sturdy phone with landline call quality and a few extra features, the Sony Ericsson w760a is a good bet. I wouldn't recommend it if you're a phone-internet user, or an obsessive texter, but if you just want to make calls and a few texts here or there, this is an excellent choice.

ORIGINAL REVIEW: I have AT&T wireless and got the Sony w760 as a replacement for my Sony w580i, which I had been using for about five months, before the speaker got messed up.

At first I thought it was great to be upgraded to the latest phone (even though the w580i was itself a pretty new phone), but I soon saw the flaws.

First, while the w760 is mostly the same interface and also of a very similar design to the w580i, there have been small changes, most of them are NOT for the better. The phone itself is slightly larger than the w580 which isn't a huge deal, unless you really like smaller phones. But the plastic and metal on it feel cheaper, thinner and tackier; I think the w580 is a much classier-looking phone than this w760. That said, I can tell now that the w760 is probably much sturdier and less plasticky-fragile.

My biggest gripe is with the added graphics. The menus and colors and themes produce less legible text and numbers (and they're less attractive) on the w760 and the fancy transitions and effects slow down commands and make the w760 a much slower phone for everyday operations, such as writing text messages, browsing through your address book, or accessing the main menu.

Some problems from the w580i have carried over to this one. I don't like how phone numbers aren't "formatted" American-style (with dashes in-between the numbers: 123-456-7890) in the address book, when you receive a call or when you type a number on the screen. Instead, you just get a 10-digit string of numbers, with no spaces or dashes, which makes it difficult to read and recognize numbers easily in the small chunks that we're used to.

The battery life is also not as long as I'd like, though it's not terrible by any means. With my old Nokia, I'd charge the phone maybe once a week at most, whereas with this Sony I have to charge it once every three days. I use the phone for on average 1000 minutes a month, or 30 minutes a day, along with listening to the radio two or three hours a week.

That said, call quality is excellent. It's about as close to a regular landline that I've ever heard and slightly improves on the quality of the w580i. Voices sound natural and the volume can be adjusted easily. Some other great features includes the "tasks" scheduler as well as a built-in FM radio.

This is an excellent phone if you're a music-lover as it carries MP3s, has a great speaker, and various features of that kind. It also has a 3.2 megapixel camera (the w580i had only 2 megapixels) which is good for taking quick photos or even video.

Some improvements include 3G capability (which I don't use) and also the AT&T GPS features which gives you directions and maps (but you pay a data fee to use it).

If the user interface were cleaner and faster this phone would be awesome. As it stands, it's adequate for my simple needs (calls and texts).

Edit:

I take all that back; the third of our w760a's, already a replacement has just gone kaput with a blank screen, which replaced the prior one whose screen looked all cracked inside. All 3 would start doing random functions now and again, one had a battery that would get searing hot after 2 minutes of a call, and the last replacement's music was unusable because you could not get it to produce sound above a whisper on the head phones on any of the "propitiatory" pain in &^* multiple head phones and adapters I had to buy extra to use at the start. As these last two replacements were two mouthes past the 1 year original warranty period on the original phones, ATT and Sony-Erickson both refuse to do anything at all, the quote from ATT being "bummer dude".

Sony-Erickson phones are absolute rubbish and I will never buy one again, and likely to leave ATT at the end of the contract if not sooner

end of edit (re-rated at 1 instead of original 4)
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Not sure what phone is reviewed below because this phone works great, great call clarity, easy to use with good interface. Far sturdier and superior to the cheap feeling 580 which my nephew has and much better call clarity.

The only disappointments are the initial buying experience.

1. It is music phone, but you get no headphones or headset, which should be much clearer upfront, since it has the much and deservedly ranted about proprietary headphone, no std. 3.5 connection, you have to look for and buy compatible headphones or a converter and/or waiiiit if you want to get them much cheaper on Amazon.

2. It is music phone, but you get no memory, which should be much clearer upfront as you can only load one short song until you buy M2 memory, and/or waiiiit if you want to get it much cheaper on Amazon. Though you can get 8 gb here for a good price which works on the phone. Given you can get 1 gb for under $5, seems cheap, tacky, shortsighted to not include at least that size m2.

3. No USB cable either, also cheap here.

4. ATT blocks out the fitness tracker software, but can get at phone site.

All of which sours the experience of being excited to get, open and try the good stuff only to find you need to go on a scavenger treasure hunt and wait days or more to see if the good stuff works, bad business/marketing.

But Love the phone in the end and recommend it highly.

I'm surprised with the reviews sometimes. You want to buy something and you want to check whether people like it by reading the reviews but what you find is such different opinions that it's impossible to find out if the item is really good or not. So I bought this phone before anyone posted a review on amazon.
I actually took two same phones - black one for me and red one for my wife. We are both happy as we use them as just the phones. I doesn't look cheap and it looks way batter then previous model w580i. I would even say that w580i is just a crap. I owned w300i before and it would be a great phone if not for the buttons. It didn't have green/red buttons to make a call and disconnect as all normal phone have. Instead it hasd C button. This phone has all the buttons you neeed and they are big and have enough space between them.
The screen is big, bright and has good resolution. I like the menus and that you can create shorcuts on arrow buttons. Also Address book is accessible by pressing right button, camera is turned on by left button, menu is selected by "enter" button so you can program 4 arrow buttons anyway you want.
I also considered z750 but read a lot of bad reviews about its battery. I hope this one performs better. People recharge z750 after 1-2 days, these two phones already two days since the last charge and still have 75% of their charge. I guess it will become worse but still...
What else... You slide the phone to close it and it locks itself to prevent accidental press of a button, you slide it open and it unlocks or you can press two buttons to unlock it which means you don't have to open it at all unless you need to dial. I guess this is standard.
The speaker is good and loud. You can even listen to the music on it (of course the quality is not like a boombox).
One of the reviewers rated this phone with one star by saying that it doesn't have memory to store songs and the sync up software is bad. I can add to this that this phone doesn't have a flashlight, a karaoke, a scanner, a printer and windows vista premium. I guess this is because it's just a phone. What a sync software has to do with the phone? I don't even have this software so I have no idea if it's bad or not. And memory - 4gb flash card costs around 20$!!! And when you buy a digital camera do you get much memory with it? This review is just for the phone not for add-ons.
I'm actually angry with all the phone manufactures that they don't make standard headphone jacks on the cell phones. You need to have an adapter and this phone doesn't even have one in the package! w300i came with one but it's a pain to remember to take it with you so I listened to the music just couple of times as I never had the adapter with me when I needed one. Shame on you SONY and everyone else! You already created a mess with batteries, charging devices and cables now you added this headache with the headphones.
I don't know if the camera is good. it doesn't have a flash so it's like an "emergency" camera. I've never used a camera on the phone.
So my resume. This is a great phone and the best I've seen so far. If it proves itself as reliable as w300i I would say this is the best CELL PHONE ever made.

I've owned several Motorola phones in the past and was hesitant to switch to a Sony Ericsson. Since I was going to be stuck with `this' phone for the next 2-years, I spent a good amount of time researching several phones (LG, Motorola, SE, Iphone, and Samsung) and found this one was prefect. CNET gives it a very high rating!! (BTW-I would have loved to get the IPhone but I didn't want to pay the extra monthly service charges the phone requires and as a `phone' it is quite large to carry around.)

I wanted a Slide Phone but not one that was too bulky & thick and also one that had a key-pad that would (1) last and (2) had numbers that were not too small. Surprisingly CNET reviewed several phones that did not meet those simple criteria.

While I waited for my phone to be delivered, I saw the previous reviews. I became very concerned about the choice I had made. Well, I have had this phone for 2 weeks and have not seen any of the problems the other reviewers listed. I bought a 4G M2 card and have loaded a good amount of music and images. The great thing is, the computer software is free on SE's site, where Motorola made you pay for theirs.

So, to say the least, I love this phone. I LOVE the walkman 'SensMe' feature, the fact you can shake the phone to shuffle or go to the next song, and you can lift or lower the phone to change the volume... Not to mention, for the size you get a great camera and AAC/MP3 player all in one! It's prefect! Also, if I want to add web-access, I can add it later but I am not committed to an additional monthly service plan like I would have been with the I-Phone. Honestly, the list of what I love goes on.

Also, I did send SE an e-mail suggesting they read the reviews on Amazon's site. SE also provides software upgrades for their phones so if there is an issue, hopefully they would fix it. I have received an e-mail back informing me they have not had those issues reported as of yet but would look into them.

I HIGHLY recommend this phone! And it easily deserves the 5-stars I have given it!!!

I have had this phone for almost a week. After exploring the features I guess this is really a good phone for the price.

Pros
3.2 MP camera -- the photos are real good when taken in daylight.
very interactive -- has haptic feedback
call clarity -- excellent
Great voice recognition for recorded commands

Cons
lack of flash for camera
proprietary head set (C'mon Sony include 3.5 mm head set jack)
keys looks too plastic

When my w810i dropped and broke, I was sad...I had to get a new phone after 3 years. I loved that thing. But I got what was supposed to be the latest model of the same thing - the w760a - so I was excited. Well, that was in the middle of December. 3 1/2 months later, I now have to get a new phone because of how absolutely shoddy this piece of junk is.

Features are fine. And at first, everything works fine. But then, you'll notice that your selected wallpaper (I used a camera picture) will sort of "reset" itself. You go to the menu for anything, and it'll come back. But then you'll notice it does it more often. And then, it'll start to reboot itself. That's right...the phone will shut off and restart. It'll first sort of freeze up as it's about to do it...but it'll then reboot. And then it'll become more and more frequent...and then even do it DURING CALLS! That's when I decided to use my service plan from Best Buy. After a MONTH of having to use an old phone, they'd decided to give me a brand new one. It couldn't be fixed, and that wasn't Best Buy's Geek Squad...they gave up a while before...it was Sony themselves who said it was irreparable.

Let me insert here that Best Buy's protection plan is nice, but I had this brand new, just-recently-came-out, $[...] phone, and they wanted me to leave a deposit to use one of their "loaner phones"...some crappy old clunker with no features whatsoever. It wouldn't be so bad if they didn't want that deposit to be $[...]! If I don't bring back the obviously inferior phone, don't give me mine back! But I'm not tying up that kind of money for crap. Luckily, I had my wife's old phone, and used that.

Well, I got my new w760a a little over 2 weeks ago. No problems...until yesterday. It reset the wallpaper. I didn't think too much of it...because it wasn't a problem yet...until last night. The phone rebooted itself. Then this morning, I got up and the wallpaper had reset itself again. So I'll be trading in the piece of garbage for some OTHER phone today.

From what I've read, there's 2 other kinds of reviews on here. One says it's great...no troubles. The others are people who are a bit pickier, and don't like the phone too much. Well this one's different than both of those. It says that Sony has made a bunch of these phones defectively, and that they can't even fix it. I was so very much a Sony Ericsson guy for years, when it came to phones. Now I don't know what I'll get...but I promise it won't be another one of these useless pieces of crap.

Let me also say that the phone is beyond well cared for. It hasn't been dropped, banged into...even scratched. It was the same with the other one. I'm not sure what I'll be getting, but I was so frustrated with the turn of events on the last one, that I'd already talked to Best Buy about giving me something else if it happened again. And while dealing with them can sometimes be like pulling teeth, I'll have to do it...because this thing is worthless.

(Updated: 4/1/09)

(Note: If I could change the star rating, I'd remove one star and make it 3 stars due to reliability issues.)

The GOOD:

1) Ordered through Amazon with contract extension, phone arrived within 3 business days, surprisingly fast. (Note: Don't ever use the included SIM card if you're doing contract extension. You may mess up your AT&T account if you do.)

2) Phone has a great collection of features, 3G worldwide for example. Go to Sony Ericsson's and AT&T's sites for details.

3) Display and sound are generally brilliant for a phone of this size.

4) Can be debranded easily if you must.

The BAD:

1) Phone occasionally shuts itself off, or locks up and need to remove battery to restart. Phone seems to have a bit of problem with robustness, although Sony Ericsson is pretty good at coming out with software updates that you can install yourself. Hopefully future software will fix these nasty problems.

2) One day, out of nowhere, top 1/3 of the display got dust particles trapped beneath the display, perhaps they entered through the memory slot?! (1 in a million??) Called Amazon and they are next day'ing a new one to me and I can print out a prepaid return shipping label, good experience so far on the replacement process.

2.1) 03/31/09 Got my replacement phone today. It's also defective!! :( The slider is stiff and does not slide all the way up when you open it, unless you push it all the way up. Called Amazon again and they are next day'ing another one.

3) Common to AT&T phones, GPS is locked down to only pre-installed apps, forget about Google map with GPS (unless you debrand). The pre-installed Navigator (GPS navigation by TeleNav) is perhaps the best navigation software for this phone, followed by Wayfinder and Amaze for the debranded version, skip Nav4All(crappy routing).

4) AT&T took out some original Sony apps and features. You can download some of them here: wap.sonyericsson.com

5) AT&T removed one important function from the original SE phone, and it is well hidden from users. User installed apps cannot connect to the internet using TCP/sockets, they have to use HTTP. Found this out with Opera Mini. HTTP is slower, and if an app does not support HTTP, it won't work. So some apps from wap.getjar.com would work on the original SE phone(W760i), would not work on AT&T branded version(W760a).

6) No accessories. You have to get it yourself if you want a car charger, memory card(4GB, 8GB works too, anyone tried 16GB??), headset, USB cable. You can get them here on Amazon for cheap.

I currently use iPhone 3G and I got this phone for my wife and I wish lot of convenient features found on this phone are there on iPhone. I have tried lot of smart phones with big screens and touch screens and I can tell you no other phones can beat this Sony Ericsson when it comes to the ease of dialing and texting. Only Blackberries and few Windows Mobile phones make dialing an easy task like this phone.

I don't want to go into the details of the phone as many review sites like gsmarena.com provide excellent review for the fancy features in the phone.

To me, the ease of making calls while driving is the most important feature. This phone has Smart Dialing which I love. Just slide out the keys and say I want to call "John" I just click on 5-6-4 and John shows up in a list. Most phones like iPhone, Samsungs, LGs, and Nokia N-series I have to open the contacts and search for JOHN to find his number. I am missing this ease on my iPhone. I had to buy several apps like "Call Wife", "Speed Dial 1", "Speed Dial 2", "Speed Dial 3", "Smart Dial", etc on iPhone to make dialing easy while driving. This smart dialing gets even more convenient when you have large list of contacts. Also, I like how easy it is to access other numbers for a contact to whom we just dialed. Just go to Logs and selection Options - Details and you will see his other numbers like Home/Office/Email, etc. Also, sending Text Message, MMS, email, etc are all located on a pop-up menu. Very well thought out by SE.

Another neat feature is when I add a contact and his Birthday it asks if I want to add to the calendar as well. Now, google has a Sync to automatically sync the contacts on GMAIL to this phone. Don't have worry about sync contacts anymore with Windows Contacts or Outlook.

The MMS interface can't be any better. I am easily able to create a nice media clip which includes Video, pictures, animations, recorded sound, etc along with text. I use it a lot to wish friends on their Birthdays.

Some other cool features this phone has (Maybe debranding it got some nice features):
Google Latitude works and not on my iPhone :-(.
Multiple applications can be left running.
Lot of free themes, games can be downloaded from forums like Howard and esato.

PS. Search for "Debranding W760a AT&T" on google. It took me less than 30 minutes to debrand and the phone actually got faster after I debranded. But you lose all AT&T software.

Best sound ever, Willie and guitar sound great, I do not know how that quality sound comes from so compact a speaker package, but it is clear, crisp, decent lows and plenty of volume (a joy to use). I have large fingers but all the buttons and controls are easy first-try success. GPS + pretty good camera @3.2 MP + FM + every function imaginable and you have a near perfect cellphone. I have tried iPhone, Nokia and others but this is by far the best overall performance out there. Add to that the Amazon price and you have the best. I like this phone. My only negative is that the battery life is slightly less than other Sony phones I have owned, but when you consider all the functions running perfectly and the enhanced sound "system" I fully understand where the current is going. I like this phone!!!

Not too bad of a phone, Sony has quit including any cables, headphones or or accessory memory cards (nothing at all) Glad I still had all mine (in good working order from my Sony W810).
The phone operation is pretty easy, nothing too hard to figure out. Accessory memory card placement is in kind of a bad spot right on the top of the phone, so if your phone slides in a case, it can come open, and the card 'WILL' pop out. But, just slide in the case top down. (Gonna get me one of those rubberized form fitting cases real soon, should prevent this from happening at all) A few too many applications and useless games that are only trial. Recommend wiping the out of box apps, and settings, and starting clean (plenty of how to's just Google it)
A nice improvement over the 580, MHO.