Sony Ericsson T610 Review
First Impressions
When I bought this phone it was ‘the phone to have’, everyone it seemed had or wanted one, it was advertised everywhere and seemed like a really nice phone, however from the day I took it out of the box I failed to be impressed by it, the build quality was excellent, with its aluminium body, but the screen I felt to be just ok and the features just average. I’m sorry to say that there was nothing that I was excited about. It is certainly a nice feeling phone and it very comfortable to use and hold, there is no squeakiness to the housing or the keypad, it’s a nice high quality feeling handset, and with its sleek lines I felt it also looked nice.
Size & Dimensions
- Length 102mm
- Width 44mm
- Depth 19mm
- Weight 95gm
- The screen is a 65k colour 128*160 colour display
Features
- Integrated camera
- 32 voice polyphonic ring tones
- Infrared
- Blue tooth
- Speed dialling
- Picture phonebook
- Icon desktop screen
- Java enabled games
- Predictive text
- Start-up/shutdown screens
- World time clock
Keypad
The phones menus are accessed with a joystick which at times was rather difficult to use as it was not very precise, I found myself in the wrong menu quite often and it took a fair while to get used to, also if I did not press the joystick in an even manner I also found that I would also end up somewhere that I didn’t want to be. The keypad has well defined, evenly spaced keys, which, however are quite small and may not suit someone with large fingers.
Menu Structure
The menus are really easy to navigate and each main menu has a submenu inside it. The menu icons are displayed on the phones screen; there are twelve icons in total, which take you to the desired menu. The phonebook has a 510 entry specification, with places to add email addresses, several other numbers and other information, you can even assign a picture to a persons number so when they call you or vice versa their picture comes up on screen. This handset also allows you to download themes, which consist of a wallpaper, screensaver and a ring tone. The nice thing I discovered about this handset was there were a lot of ways in which you could personalize this phone, the melody composer for instance allows you to create some really nice ring tones, while the java application enables you to download more games to add to the ones already preinstalled on the phone. There are the usual calendar, organiser, stopwatch and alarm clock etc that are all really easy to use.
The Camera
The camera, which can be accessed from a dedicated camera button on the side of the phone is positioned on the back of the phone and the lens is set into the body of the phone so as to avoid scratching the lens, but there is no lens cover so I was worried about damage and also about dust. There are two resolutions settings, high 288*352 and low 120*160, so the pictures are of a quality to be used as a display image or caller display only, once sent to a pc the pictures are quite blocky and pixelated. There is also a night mode facility, which wasn’t up to much plus three image effects, black and white, negative or sepia. There is no flash but you can buy a clip on one separately. Because of the phones low memory, which is 2MB there is not much room to store your photos.
The Display
The screen has a 65k colour display, which I was sure would be really nice but in my opinion the screen was certainly not the best I’ve seen. The icons on the main screen seemed to be without definition around the edges and photos didn’t display really well on the screen. The screen was bright and the saturation was of a good level but that’s the only good thing I can say about the screen. The screen of this handset is used as the camera viewfinder, but in the daylight, like a lot of other phones you couldn’t see the images on the screen, making it extremely difficult to shoot a good picture. The phone comes with changeable wallpapers or you can download your own but the preinstalled ones were rather boring (the cheese monster, all pale blues and yellows) and the colours were really pale and uninspiring. I also found when texting that the text took longer than usual to appear and also if you cleared the screen again the text took longer to disappear than most models.
Memory & Media
As I have already said the handset has only 2MB of onboard memory. This is shared between the usual contacts, audio and applications.
Battery Life & Signal Strength
My phone was on Orange and I found the reception to be excellent, the phone never dropped a signal and the strength was quite consistent. The call clarity I thought to be average with a bit of background hiss, but not enough to be or to become a problem. When you made a call the handset would show a graph, which would gradually fill up as the call was connected, I found the time that it took to get a call connected was a fair bit longer than other handsets. The battery life is quoted at being 315 hours but in reality I found the standby time to be more of five days, that was with using the phones functions, a small amount of calling etc and setting up the phone, including phonebook entries and personalizing the display and ring tones.
Media Transfer
This model comes with blue tooth and infrared, both of which were easy to connect but I found the blue tooth to be a lost more stable than the infrared. MMS is also a really good feature but the messages were a bit limited because I found I could only attach one slide, but the messages were sent and received with no problems at all. Email is also a feature, either pop3 or imap4, or otherwise you can use your web mail via the mobile Internet using the browsers GPRS. Text messaging is also made easy using the predictive text facility and also the inbuilt templates come in handy for the messages, which you send often. I found texting to be really slow as the amount of times you need to press the buttons to format and add addresses and the like seemed to go around the houses a fair bit.
Summary
I was excited at having this ‘must have’ handset, only to be disappointed. There was nothing wrong with this phone but there was nothing special or exciting about it either. If you are looking for a basic but reliable handset and you don’t mind the quality on the pictures then this handset may be for you, but if you are looking for a handset with a good camera or more advanced features then I would look elsewhere. The handset is readily available on most of the networks and there is a lot of downloadable content for it available. I find this model to be the Volvo of the phone world, well built, reliable but ultimately boring.
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