Convergence is the buzzword and the Cyber-shot Walkman affair-turned-marriage is busy producing offspring. And hey, the young Sony Ericsson W995 sure makes the first-born W902 look like a helpless orphan.
Easily the best equipped feature phone of the house, Sony Ericsson W995, still more popular as Hikaru, packs in all there is to find at the top of the company portfolio. The full set of connectivity options, the biggest screen on a Sony Ericsson feature phone to date, GPS, Wi-Fi and the great user interface make a sweet enough package on their own.
But in the case of W995 they're just the perfect background for the unprecedented blend of music and imaging. The Cyber-shot line is graciously lending its 8 megapixel triumph, while the music dowry includes the latest Walkman 4.0 player, with all the bare Walkman necessities such as Shake control and SensMe. And there's more to make it even sweeter. We called it a marriage and Sony Ericsson have taken due care of the wedding presents. We don't know what else to call the kickstand and the on-board 3.5 mm audio jack.

The Sony Ericsson W995 is a slider, so you'd expect it to be on the chunky side. That said, they've kept it reasonably slim by keeping the top part to a svelte 4mm, delivering the vital statistics of 97x49x15mm and 113g. So it's still a fair old handful, but not bad at all considering what's inside

it's not the slimmest slider phone, but it does pack a lot of features

namely the six semicircles surrounded the circular D-pad on the front (call start and stop, plus two soft keys, cancel and the shortcuts menu), and the music controls on the right side, plus a volume/zoom rocker and camera shutter button.

On the left side there's Sony Ericsson's Fast Port power socket, a dedicated Walkman button and the Memory Stick Micro slot, though it's hidden under the back cover.
At the top there's a 3.5mm headphone jack (at last!) while on the back is the 8.1 megapixel lens (wot, no cover? For shame…), LED flash and a small metal flip stand so you can set it somewhere handy to watch video.
It's right at the end of the phone though and ours kept falling over until we realised it worked best with the slider open

camera
The Xenon flash is downgraded to standard LED but most of the other Sony Ericsson features are there, including an image stabiliser and auto focus, as well as smile detection and the marvellous BestPic, which takes seven pics in quick succession, both before and after you press the shutter, to ensure you get the best snap.
There's also a 16x digital zoom, macro setting and panorama, though we found this didn't stitch the three images together as easily as some versions of this feature.
Pictures were great in comparison with lesser camphones, but not quite up to the top standard of the 8 megapixel brigade – close inspection revealed a modicum of blurring and a bit too much purple fringing on the edges. It didn't seem to handle bright light particularly well either.
Video provided better quality than we were expecting, though it's still a drop in standard from the still picture images.