fun with phones

Monday, December 22, 2003, at 08:40PM

By Eric Richardson

I wrote the other day that I was thinking about getting a new phone. Well, I did. I've had a lot of phones over the years, so I'll give my thoughts on the Sony Ericsson T616 so far.

It's sort of funny counting back all the different phones I had. I don't even remember the model of the first one. It was an older flip circa 97-98. Then I had a Nextel i1000 for a while (probably 98-99 - 2000). Then for a short time I had a Motorola Timeport L7089 (summer of 2000). Then it was an Ericsson T28 World for a bit (2000-2001). Then that went in a pool, died, and before it came back to life I got a Motorola v3682. That I had until it died (the flip screen stopped working), and Cingular replaced it with a Motorola v60g. That phone eventually had the antenna break off, and Cingular replaced it with a v60i (basically the same as the v60g, except I liked it less).

But now I'm back to an Ericsson (errr... Sony Ericsson) with a T616. Though I did get it because of the camera, this is a cool phone in general. I go through a lot of debate on the flip/no-flip thing, but when I had the L7089 I did really like that form factor. We'll see how things go this time around. The phone's got every feature you could think of: bluetooth, IR, GPRS, WAP, etc, so even if you don't care about the camera (or think of it as a toy), it's still a phone that'll do the job. Though Motorola made huge UI improvements with the v60, they still don't have the simplicity of the Ericsson call info screens. The contact manager is much smarter, but that's as much a function of time as manufacturer.

The camera quality is about what you'd expect... I'll be posting some examples from that soon.