Xmas Phones

It's that time of year when people start asking me what phone they ought to buy for here in , so I'll save everyone the trouble and trim the options down to one:

My pick is the SonyEricsson /, which is (by far) the best compromise between size and features on the market right now.

Add a decent, very usable interface, very respectable battery life, excellent Bluetooth, great MIDP implementation and an FM radio, and you have a very good, flexible GSM/UMTS mobile phone that will work perfectly with your - and costs a lot less than most.

Its only real fault is the lack of a memory slot, something it makes up for with a (sub-mini) port and a normal SonyEricsson accessory connector (i.e., it doesn't use the new, completely incompatible high-density connector that the / has).

And no, I won't go into music phones - at this point, and considering the relatively immature state of that micro-segment, I can only recommend the 's cousins. I can, however, most definitely not recommend the . It's simply not good enough as a phone - get a decent phone and a instead.

As usual, if you absolutely must have a Symbian phone, the N70 is probably the best bang for the buck right now, although I find the keypad too small for my fingers (I find, in general, that the other current Nokia models are a tad too expensive for the features they deliver).

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