Sony Ericsson T630 Review

Overall Rating

- It's just a really cool phone!
- Very large high quality display.
- Relatively good camera.
- Great connectivity.

- Volume too low during calls.
- Display difficult to view in bright daylight.
- Menu system too long winded.
- No digital zoom on camera.
- Limited numbers in address book groups.

I bought the Sony Ericsson T630 phone because I was looking for a smart-looking good-camera phone with colour screen, polyphonic sounds, wap and bluetooth capability and that's exactly what I got with this one. It's a really cool looking phone, compact and feels good in your hand with a very rich feature range. The large display is excellent for WAP, photos, etc with excellent colour support. The camera produces quite good quality photos (for a phone) which I can beam to my PDA via infrared or my PC via Bluetooth. I can also connect my PDA to the internet via IR.

I found the menu system difficult to get used to - it's very different from my previous Nokia and I found it takes too many button presses to get to the menu option you want. While the camera quality is ok, better than some phones I've seen, the auto-contrast/brightness is poor so you sometimes have to fiddle with the composition to get a photo that isn't over-exposed. Also, the night mode really slows down the camera too much and it would be good if the camera had even a limited digital zoom.

The address book groups work slightly differently rrom that on my Nokia in that rather than allocating a whole contact to a group, you can allocate number by number .... this is actually a really great feature allowing me to separate a persons business and personal numbers into different groups with different rings or profiles. However, this approach requires a far higher number of entries in each group and unfortunately the phone can barely support half of the group entries I'd like to make.

The phone didn't come with a headset, not even a single earpiece wired one. I also missed the stereo radio my Nokia had.

Battery life is difficult to comment on in that I've not had a phone of this rich a feature range before and my previous phone had a far longer battery life. I would probably describe the battery life as very short, requiring recharge every couple of days.