I’m about a once-a-quarter cellphone upgrader. I used a little Nokia for a long time, nearly a year, I think, then went for the Sony-Ericsson T68i (crap), Motorola T720i (flip-phone crap), and finally, the Nokia 6200 (fantastic, but limited for what I was looking for).
A few days ago, I picked up the new Sony-Ericsson T616, and I finally think I’ve found the phone I’ve been looking for all my life. I gush about technology, I know that. I’m a complete sucker for the latest thing with buttons, but this thing is incredible. It has a big screen, excellent connectivity, a built-in camera, and Bluetooth to sync with iSync.
I’d read some pretty scathing reviews on the thing before I picked it up – that connectivity was poor, the screen was impossible to read in bright light, and the interface was confusing. Well, the RF reception is astounding, like the folks at SE finally woke up and realized users did not, in fact, use there phones with taught strings and tin cans attached. This thing connects in places around Portland where my Nokia couldn’t dream of connecting. The screen is as crisp as I’ve seen on a cell, though the passive matrix display does suffer from slight ghosting – it’s certainly nothing that gets in the way of standard use in bright daylight.
Finally, the interface is confusing only inasmuch as I’m so accustomed to the Nokia GUI. Still, in just a few hours of exploring every aspect of the thing, I had it down pat. That I didn’t have to manually enter contacts certainly helped. I don’t care how great T9 texting may be, I just don’t have the thumbs of a 15-year-old Japanese schoolgirl.
The one thing I wish they could do is to figure out how to associate the number type with the number in the Copy-To-SIM function so that you wouldn’t have to manually reassign them within contacts when you copy them all from the SIM to a new phone. That’s just one of those things that some enterprising young know-it-all should be able to get right.