Why the Ericsson R320s rocks (Ericsson R320s)

Member Name: pillock

Product:	Ericsson R320s
Date:	20/03/01 (64 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Size, quality, features

Disadvantages: no T9 text.

Well, for a start it's tiny. I've had a few phones that look small but aren't - Nokia 5110, Ericsson GA628. The R320s on the other hand looks quite chunky until you get your hands on it and realise it's about as thin as a phone could ever get, even with the supplied heavy duty battery it's less than an inch thick at the widest part.

Having upgraded from a 7110, I knew most of the features such as WAP and how good/bad they were on that. It was surprising then to find that the 320 was a much nicer phone to use - apart from the animated menus taking fractionally too long to whizz through, the WAP browser is friendly to use and it has a neat multi-purpose up/down slider on the side which scrolls pages, turns the volume up and down, selects characters in SMS's and so on.

The call quality is fine - although the earpiece is a bit quiet sometimes, it hasn't dropped a call yet and it never misses bits of conversations. Also the battery life is a lot longer than any other phone i've had - they advertise around 100 hours but the phone actually provides that, instead of not reaching the manufacturers figures like most other handsets. Also, a bit big plus is that it has a status screen showing accurate estimations of talktime and standby time remaining - so you know whether it'll last the day!

the IrDA works well - it has a built-in modem, so plonk it in front of an IR equipped computer and it'll get straight online. Speed is limited to 9600bps, BUT in practise it's perfectly possible to browse the web using it, call costs permitting!

Also a nice touch is a status light on top - flashing so you can retrieve it from the depths of a dark pocket, shows charging status when plugged in, flashes faster when a call or message is being recieved etc. saves looking at the screen, although this is a nice blue backlit number. It also vibrates - yummy!

So in general, a very nice practical phone. it fits
in your pocket, lasts a long time and works well. It doesn't do logos or ringtones and you can't put horrible coloured covers on it. Kids will hate it, everyone else should have one.

Oh, one bad point - no T9 texting :(

Summary: