The w960i was my first smartphone but having used Sony ericssons in the past I thought I knew what I was letting myself in for. Sadly this was not the case.

For starters the w960 runs the symbian UIQ3 OS which is kind of obsolete now. The menu panels were similar to most other walkman devices but everything else was different. 

The w960 sports a 2.6" resistive touch screen and a stylus is included and it's slots nicely into the device itself for storage.
The phone has a very nice design being all black with White sides and a fee touch sensitive music controls above the alpha numerical keypad. 

The keypad is very easy to use with keys having satisfactory space and travel. Lacking any kind of dpad meas that navigation is done by the touch screen or the scroll wheel on the side of the phone. 

For the most part the touch screen works well enough to navigate through menus and browsing the web but some of the icons are quite small and are hard to reach on the resistive screen with out the use of the stylus.

While text entry itself was fine, selecting different words was a right pain. Pressing say 323 would spell "dad" but if you actually wanted to write "fad" you hvae to scroll and select it with the scroll wheel located on the side of the phone. This makes text entry quite slow and you wouldn't want to be tapping out lengthy emails on it. 

You can also enter text manually without t9 Which takes even longer!
You can use the touch screen to write words with the stylus which works ok but is not very accurate and some of the shortcuts are hard to learn.
Another alternative is using the on screen qwerty keyboard, which I can almost certainly say that you should not do as it does not fit the screen fully. It actually fills less than half the screen which makes it nigh on impossible to use. 

The music player on the device is fantastic given it's Walkman heritige with music sounding very full and of high quality. A problem is that there is no 3.5mm headphone jack but the included in ear headphones are quite good yet I would have liked the option of using my own. 

The phone has 8gb of storage which seems to be the industry standard and it should hold most of your music and videos. 
Videos look ok but the screen is rather small for prolonged usage. 

The OS has a few apps that can be downloaded and a few games that are compatible, nothing special which would not have been a problem 3 years ago but people are expecting more from their phones now a days. 

The camera is quite good and is quite quick to start up so is perfect for a few quick snaps. You can also edit the photos using the touch screen to draw on the picture, gimmicky but fun non the less. 

Being my first smart phone I took some time to get used to it. Once I forgot to close all my apps and my phone died over night and my alarm didn't go off so I was late for work! 
The task manager is easy to use but accessing it is very hard as the icon is so small and is located in the top corner of the screen! 

I think if you are prepared to commit some time to learning the ins and outs of the phone it will serve you well. If you're looking for something which "just works" then look elsewhere.