Sony Ericsson T610 - Vodafone - Pay As You Go

Good Points:

Bluetooth: I have a bluetooth headset, and love the fact it is wire free, and you can leave the phone in your coat, in another room and still be on a call. Wire free transfer of pictures, sounds etc with PC (provided you have a bluetooth dongle or similiar on the PC).

Screen: Huge, with 65,000 colours - really clear.

Themes: You can completely change the look of your phone by downloading themes from the Sony wapsite.

Polyphonic Ringtones: 32 channel ringtones which mean better sound.

Camera: Only 2 button presses from the main menu takes a picture, then it is really easy to add sound, text etc and send via MMS.

Speed: This phone is 100x quicker than the T68i in terms of general navigation round the menus, writing text messages etc. Whilst the text message input is not quite as quick as a Nokia, I am of an age where this does not affect me as I can't press the buttons that quick!!

Case: The phone has a metal case, which feels great. The buttons are also laid out with space inbetween, which means it is easy to text etc.

Bad Points:

Battery Life: Definately not the 300 hours advertised for standby.

Reception: Not quite as good as my Nokia 7210, but better than the T68i/Nokia 8210.

Ringing Volume: Even on it's loudest setting, certain ringtones cannot be heard that well in noisy places (unlike a Nokia on Loud setting, which is deafening). However, you can compose ringtones where the instruments are really loud, or use the 'Old Phone' Ringtone which is load.

No Radio:

Games: Supplied with one game, but you can download more at the Sony wapsite.

This is a really nice phone, which looks the business, is easy to use. It is 'different' to use than a Nokia, which some people may not like, but once you get used to it, the menus work great.

The screen is terrible, fuzzy and unclear. In bright sunlight you just cannot see anything at all so you have to go indoors or find some shade so you can actually use it. I don't know what the screen is coated with but it's always marked with smears so you are contantly cleaning it (at least it comes with a cloth for this purpose.

The camera quality is poor to say the least. Useless in anything except bright sunlight.

A capacity of 8MB means storage space is severely limited.

The Bluetooth function is good...or would be if there was some storage space on the phone.

I also find it highly annoying that it's far too easy to connect to WAP services as there are a couple of buttons that only need touching and suddenly you're connected.

The whole thing has crashed/frozen several times. Very annoying when you need to call somebody urgently.

Beware Mac users...although this phone is supposed to work with iSync...it doesn't, not properly anyway. It totally screwed up my address book although the calendar seemed fine.

On the whole a pretty depressingly flawed phone. I can't wait for my Vodafone contract to expire so I can get something else.