Sony Ericsson W902: Style dictator, headphone hater

There are two key features a portable music player needs: first, the ability to play music and second, somewhere on the device to put headphones. Sony Ericsson's new top-of-the-line Walkman music phone, the W902, only gets one out of two right.

You read correctly: it's another premium music device with no headphone socket. Instead, you'll need to use an adaptor cable to connect your decent earphones to Sony Ericsson's ridiculous proprietary connector. This gives you hands-free talking capabilities, but it also gives you metres of cabling flapping around needlessly, as evidenced in this video. And who wants to remember to take two cables with them everywhere?

Aside from this sheer idiocy, the quad-band W902 looks stunning. It has a 5-megapixel camera with autofocus and an LED photo light, a 56mm (2.2-inch), 240x320-pixel screen, stereo Bluetooth, 25MB of internal memory that's expandable to 8GB and it weighs a light 100g.

There's every reason to be excited about this phone and we can't help but think it'll be a brilliant upgrade from the W880i if your 18 month contract is about to come to an end. 

The W902 will be out towards the end of the year and you can expect our full review as soon as humanly possible. Until then, absorb the next few pages for some glossy bonus photos. -Nate Lanxon

Update: Check out our photos of the Sony Ericsson W595 and W302 Walkman phones, also launched today.