Ericsson R320s Review

Overall Rating

Robust construction, IR port, many advanced features

slow software, designed like not-very-nice chocolate bar, antenna like on satellite phones, unintuitive menus, rather short battery life, short melodies, weak vibration alert, no goodies e.g. caller groups, operator logo, call-ID-icons...

I bought this Ericsson R320 / R320s mobile phone after I read many reviews. Almost every one of them hardly found anything bad on the phone, so I thought I would solve a phone problem once for all. Oh, how wrong I was.
It is very rich with features, and it would take too much space to mention them all here. On the other hand, to use all these features you have to fight the menus, which are not particularly intuitive. For some reason (battery saving, maybe) every operation on the phone is slow, going through menus, adding numbers to the phonebook... Writing an SMS I find specifically annoying. It has T9 but it can't figure out that after a full stop comes capital letter. Typing is painfully slow and as your message gets longer it gets slower (I found myself waiting for 5 letters which I typed, to appear on the screen). The screen is nice with its blue light, but until that light goes off you hear a buzzing sound from the speaker. Sometimes, without any obvious reason the phone just freeze and you have to remove the battery and put it back on to reset it. Sometimes strange artefacts appear on the screen, and disappear after you open and close menus.
And finally a design is not something that will help you get girls attention; actually I almost convinced some people that I made the phone myself, because I didn't want to spend money on buying one.
This device is definitely not for everyone. The user must be emotional about Ericsson name to keep using it. It has IR, but what good is that without GPRS, EMS, MMS, decent software to sync it with your PC or PocketPC, longer ringing tones, logos... almost useless. It has two nice games, but target users don't care about such things. I can't loose the feeling that it came out on the market too soon, like somebody rushed it out of the factory without testing it.