Tao of Mac

Aug 9th 2004 · 2 min read

SonyEricsson T610

I had the opportunity to use a for a while, and here are my pros and cons (based on BrunoRodrigues' initial impressions, translated and with my own):

It acts (and feels) like a on steroids, with a few enhancements.

Pros:

  • Solidly built, sturdy aluminum casing.
  • Excellent display (OK resolution, excellent contrast and legibility under all lighting conditions)
  • Approximately the same size and weight as an 8310 or 7250i
  • Nice features:
    • IRDA and Bluetooth with reasonably decent OBEX support (beams and receives GIFs, s, MIDIs and contact/calendar data as vCard and )
    • MMS support for large (64KB) animated GIFs (like the network stats I receive)
    • Portrait camera with decent refresh rate (288x352)
    • 16-bit (65536 color) screen
    • MIDP support (but although we could beam .jar files to it from a , none of the really fun ones worked, and wierd stuff happened even on "standard" applets - like mismatched screen/applet sizes, etc.)
    • Polyphonic MIDI ringtones (beamable to and from the phone), AMR audio support
    • Color WAP browser (still not very intuitive and slowish, but more useable than on the )
    • Organizer (calendar understands meeting "locations")
  • IMAP and POP3 client (no SSL support, however)
  • Very fast attachment (but the browser renders slowly)
  • Auto keyboard lock

Cons:

  • It's still buggy (I managed to render all my contacts invisible, with only the selection bar scrolling up and down on an empty screen)
  • It's hideously fiddly to do simple operations like sending an SMS (6 or 7 clicks against 3-4 on a Nokia, measured from start - including shortcuts to "new" message - to the SMS actually being sent to the contact you painstakingly picked.)
  • You can't assign your own sounds to SMS notifications
  • There is apparently to way to define an SMS/MMS distribution list or an easy way to send messages to multiple recipients
  • Contacts can only have 3 phone numbers (Home, Work, Mobile) plus e-mail (the Series 60 supports a variable number of fields)
  • It's still slow. Slow key response, slow scrolling, slow e-mail parsing, slow browser...
  • The browser is WAP-only and not XHTML-capable like the 7250i's
  • Counter-intuitive key placement (it's too damn easy to accidentally delete a contact, for instance)
  • Overly sensitive joystick (it's too easy to accidentally start the browser, for instance)
  • Camera does not support landscape mode and has very low resolution (288x352)
  • No way to check estimated battery life
  • HUGE, bulky and utterly horrible full-screen dialogs to enter URLs, e-mail addresses, etc.
  • No multitasking whatsoever (unlike Series 60 phones, you can't, say, switch from calendar to contacts and compose e-mail during a call)
  • images don't have tags

Frills:

  • SMS Chat mode
  • Dedicated buttons for camera, browser
  • Supports OTA configuration of e-mail accounts (untested)
  • Very neat music editor (a pocket 4-track MIDI sequencer with prebuilt drum, riffs and bass lines that saves songs as standard MIDI files)

Supported Bluetooth services as reported by 10.3.4:

OBEX File Transfer, Dial-up Networking, Voice gateway, Serial Port 1, Serial Port 2, OBEX Object Push, IrMC Synchronization, HF Voice gateway, OBEX Basic Imaging

Resources:

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