Product Review: SonyEricsson T610

I’ve had my SonyEricsson T610 at least three months now, and I have to say, I’m quite impressed.

I don’t ask too much of mobile phone, I’m not into all of the ring tones, polyphonic tunes and the like. I have simple needs and I’m no longer a teenager, so I like to keep things simple.

However, this is the second handset I’ve had. The first one had to be sent back. Now, I could go into a long rant about what happened, why the first handset had to go back and how the customer support I received was utterly ridiculous, and how I told them as much to their faces in the store in town, making them look quite stupid. But I won’t.

Suffice to say, this handset is fine. So we’ll leave it at that. I run my own business, so I have a defined set of needs straight away. My requirements are simple: I need to be able to send text messages, I need to make calls, I need voice mail, I need to be able to check my email on the road and I need to be able to connect my mobile to my computer to synchronize address books, calendar events, notes and the like.

So the choice of mobile was quite limited, but I feel that I made the right choice. I’ll dispense with any insight into tariffs and other trivia, this review is about the phone.

The handset has a pleasing weight to it, and given that some of the carcass is metal, there’s a qualitative feel as well. However, the upper portion is made of plastic, and quite thin plastic at that. This being a contributory factor in the return of the first handset .. but I did say I wouldn’t go into that.

But, it’s worth noting, the upper portion of case can be fragile, so be careful when messing around with the battery compartment, and just generally throwing the thing around.

Being an old Nokia user, I was concerned about ease of use. I’ve not found anyone else come close to Nokia in that department. So when I knew my new mobile phone wouldn’t be Nokia -- mainly because of connectivity and cost -- I had to be very careful.

In the end, the user interface isn’t all that bad. There are some moments of strange feature grouping and some features are so buried, there’s nothing left to do but to dip into the manual to figure out where the design team have squirreled the thing away.

Thankfully, things like Bluetooth, Internet connection, silent mode and Infrared are all a single button away. This a bonus for me. I go to the cinema quite a lot, so I really don’t want to be that ignorant bastard with their phone going off at that crucial point in the film.

Connecting the phone to my computer is a breeze. I use Bluetooth to synchronize data between the two, which is so much more convenient than cable connections.

I had to pick my phone from the list of supported types and manufacturers which isn’t all that restrictive, given my needs. So being able to synchronize so seamlessly was just sublime.

The battery life is bit of a joke. The colour screen is an enormous problem in this particular equation. I have all of the power saving features on, but I still don’t get a full week of mild usage and standby, which is a shame.

Using such things as the built-in camera will knock the crap out of the battery in no time, and sending picture messages and the like will only add to that. By way of a smooth segue, that brings us to the built-in camera.

It’s rubbish. If you’re in the business of taking poor-quality passport photographs, you’re in luck. If you’re wanting to take spur-of-the-moment snapshots of your hectic and fun life -- as the marketing drivel would have you believe -- then forget it.

There’s no compression settings, so the images degrade noticeably before your very eyes. Still, if you want that kind of thing, you go for the models up an above this one. They support higher resolution images, as you’d expect.

But this is all academic, I don’t use the camera. If I had a need for such things, I’d have bought one of the other models and not this one.

In conclusion, the SonyEricsson T610 suits my needs quite well. It’s simple enough to use and other than the frivolous inclusion of games, tunes et cetera, there’s no feature bloat, it’s compact, doesn’t look like a girls phone and has the bells & whistles that will suit the suits down to the ground...