Sony Ericsson T610 Review

Good Points
Small and compact, great colour screen, friendly operating system, great ringtones, easy to use and good quality built-in camera and top specification. Nuff said!

Bad Points
Screen hard to see in bright sunlight and feels a bit fragile for daily use!

General Comments
At first glance the Sony T610 looks like just another executive toy, all brushed aluminium and smoked glass. But make no mistake, this is a powerful piece of kit. Erik Ahlgren's sleek design is packed with features such as a full colour 65K display, tri-band, GPRS, Bluetooth, MMS messageing, WAP, T9 predictive texting AND a good quality built-in camera, all of which makes the T610 an awesome mobile phone.

At just 95 grams the phone is light enough to slip into your (designer) shirt pocket and feels well put together, but I found that I was constantly wanting to clean the outside of the phones display screen with the (supplied) Sony Ericsson cleaning cloth. I wonder how long it will be before it gets scratched? The phones keyboard is well laid out and easy to use for texting and dialling alike, and like the T68i, the T610 uses Sony's joystick arrangement for menu selection along with two softkeys which change their function with the selected menu. The large colour screen makes using the menu system quick and logical but it is difficult to see in very bright conditions, a problem with all colour screens! Ringtones are 32 voice polyphonic and loud enough to get your attention in the noisiest wine bar, (or vibrate for meetings) and you can download new ones or use the built-in music DJ function to compose your own. Texting is easy with T9 predictive text and the phone has full MMS capability along with e-mail. Using WAP is a pleasure, with or without GPRS and again the Sony's colour display makes the experience more "computer" like! For the "exec" on the move, the Sony organizer will take care of all those business appointments and remind you when it is your secretary's birthday! Stored information can be exchanged using Infra-red or the built-in Bluetooth, which works very well indeed and is easy to set up for a variety of devices. As for the onboard camera, it is one of the best (on a mobile phone) that I have ever seen and certainly one of the easiest to use. Photo's can be sent in message form, stored on Sony's website, your own computer or just used in the phone book to show you who is calling. The 2MB memory is a little small if you plan to fill it with lots of photo's and downloads but should be enough for the average user. In use, the 610 is everything you need in a mobile with voice dialling and re-dial. Call quality is excellent and (now, see some earlier reviews) hiss free and with lots of use the supplied battery gave me around four days of service before needing a re-charge.

So am I happy with the T610? Yes, very! Would I recommend the T610? Yes, but with the reservation that if you are a heavy user, ie tradesman, then this lovely piece of design and engineering will not stand up to the rigours of daily use. If however, you have the time to look after it, this mobile phone will serve you for many years, until you can afford the Porche to go with it. It looks silly on the dashboard of my Nissan Micra, but hell I can dream can't I?