Ericsson T68 Review

Overall Rating

fast WAP/email, small size (easily fits in pocket), great looks. autolock keys feature. full configurability. joystick is useful. and of course, phone & orgranizer's functionality and great looks. suits for those who want to have it all.

menus may be a bit confusing, as is the printed manual. battery seems to last less than hyped.

The Ericsson T68 mobile phone is for mature people who want all of it. Has virtually everything you need from a mobile phone, plus most of what you use your Palm for. Unlike your Palm, easily fits in your pocket. I haven't had any problems whatsoever - no freezing, no reboots, no turning on and off by inself, no problems with reception or sound quality. Large screen and options for navigation make using WAP and checking POP3 mail fast and easy.
Features I note after a couple of Motorolas:
1) address book (500 names) is organized as in Outlook, ie you have home/work/mobile number phone entries for each person in the book. plus, e-mail address etc. minus: can't store street address
2) calendar is much like that in Outlook, with appointments/tasks, recurring events, etc., although the screen is a bit small for it and editing assignments from the phone is a rather slow process (compared to the PC =:)
3) WAP is fast and enjoyable. email can be collected from POP3 servers with miminum time online. "Resume" option to connect to the site you've been on last time, plus conveniently handled bookmarks and other ways to make your browsing easier. point to note: AFAIK, at the moment only BT and Vodafone support GPRS (which makes it even faster)
4) lightweight & small, easily fits in jeans pocket. it's the size of Nokia 8210, but by orders of magnitude more respectful. autolock option locks the keys after a few seconds so that you can safely carry it in your pocket. in mp3 handsfree the music stops when you hear a call
5) on the downside, the menu system may be a bit confusing until you understand it, and the printed manual is not well-organised. for this reason (and also if you can't read well ;-) you may not even know it has the option to add unsaved numbers to address book (well, it does) and lots of others as well. on the other hand, some menus have help right in the phone
6) if your PC doesn't have IRd, you'll have to spend (get ready!) about 40 pounds for a simple COM-port cable. and a Bluetooth handsfree costs over a hundred quid. On the other hand, for 40 quid your can buy a decent MP3 handsfree from Ericsson, which is (check this!) about the size of your MCC card. Just search the net!
7) text messaging may be slow, especially with T9 on. first thing I did was to remove the T9 functionality. don't miss it too much anyway.
8) was surprised to find playable games, although sometimes it's easy to make wrong moves with the joystick (which otherwise is a great thing). on the downside, when the screenlight is on (which is always the case during the game), it eats away the battery like crazy.
9) by the way, in the status window you can see the battery status as "xxx standby time, xxx talk time left" which really amazed my friend Sony fan. not sure if that status has anything to do with real life though, unless it shows that the battery is at null.

overall, if things can make you more respectful, T68 is one of the few such things. buy it on cheap contract (don't pay more than 100 pounds - such offers are easy to find), then switch to whatever price plan you like after a month. check out the "option" button to find context-sensitive menus which may be surprisingly useful. learn to play Contrary. you're unlikely to be disappointed.