Ericsson T68i
The T68i is part of the new wave of colour screen phones. Is Sony Ericsson making waves or drowning with unusable features?
Sony Ericsson's new colour T68i is nearly identical to the "Gold member" T68 but it has a few more features to make this joystick phone "fun" including 1MB of storage for digital pictures. Its main selling point is undoubtedly the MMS capabilities that allow users to send and receive MMS messages.
At just 100x48x20mm the phone looks sleek with a 100x80mm colour screen and blue backlit buttons. The screen resolution was a little bit disappointing compared to Samsung's T100 128x160 colour screen. At this time the T68i comes only in the light blue and silver colour which makes this phone look a lot more conservative than the T68's snazzy gold.
Using any phone can be difficult to grasp at first, but Sony Ericsson have attempted to make this easy with the 5-axis joystick feature and an easy to navigate menu on only one screen.
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While the T68i might not look as snazzy as the T68, it's definitely much less conservative when it comes to features. The new MMS capabilities allow users to send multimedia messages not only to other phones but also to email addresses.
Sony Ericsson enhances the phone with an optional snap on digital camera accessory, the communicam mca-20. This allows users to take a picture and send it via MMS to another phone or directly to an email address.
The quality of the pictures recorded is average when viewed on the 256 colour screen. Export it out and you end up with a small picture that looks as though it's been taken with a regular digital camera. The communicam is a fun add-on however it's hardly a substitute for a real digital camera, and at AU$399 it's a touch expensive.
With all these fun features you may have a problem finding a carrier for the phone. At the time of writing Telstra is the only major company that supports the MMS capabilities. Vodafone and Optus are gearing up to to release MMS services by the end of August 2002.
The T68i comes both Infrared and Bluetooth ready and allows users to synchronise the calendar feature on the phone with Outlook contacts. The phone is also WAP 2.0 ready. However painful you may think WAP is, the T68i's joystick makes the experience of using the mobile web a little less painful.
Our main gripe with this phone is the layout of the buttons. The number buttons are close together and hard to use. Users can expect to press the wrong button by accident more often than not. That said, if you don't intend to use the number pad you can put your contacts into the address book as a voice command and even add a picture of them for reference.
With the colour screen and Communcam we were expecting to be underwhelmed with the battery life of the T68i. However the phone came up well with our tests, lasting for approximately 7 hours of talk time. That's still quite a shortfall against the claimed figure of 13 hours of talk time and 12 days standby, but we've gotten used to taking vendor battery figures with a grain of salt.
If you wish to save power, the T68i has features to disable colour to black and white and switch off the backlight. There is also a button on the top right of the phone that allows users to see how much standby and talk time is left rather than relying on a battery image on screen.
Sony Ericsson T68i
Company: Sony Ericsson
Price: T68i AU$1299 Communicam mca-20 AU$399
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 1300 650 050
Release date: September 2002
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I have read mainly positive reviews and comments about the V70. I decided to buy one. What was I thinking?
The phone is a disaster, if it were not for its looks, I would never have bought it.
For an expensive phone, the features are shocking!The phone book is hard to use, the key's on the keypad have become almost unuseable (from only 6 months of use), the screen is hard to see and the 2 or three lines of text is just not enough.
The games, well, can you actually call those applications games? And I have found that no ringtone download sites will download to a V70. There are no web pages which show you the notes to put in your phone, for a V70. 30 spaces for your own ringtones wasted!
The V70 is no where near loud enough as it should be. Even on the maximum ring volume setting, I and everyone around me cannot hear it ringing if we are in a medium density area, such as a mall. And the vibrating alert just makes a sound, you can barely feel it vibrating when it is in your pocket.
The last awful feature I have found since I started using the phone 6 months ago, is that that stylish rotator, blocks the antenna. My phone is constantly dropping calls, people I am calling sound robotic, as do I they tell me. All because the rotator sits in front of the antenna!
Better luck with the new V70i Motorola!