T20S? Make mine a Nokia! (Ericsson T20s)

Member Name: parva4

Product:	Ericsson T20s
Date:	05/12/01 (286 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Small, good battery life

Disadvantages: Clumsy phonebook, unintuitive SMS, poor WAP browsing

Okay, I'm going to disagree with many of the views here but this is my first Ericsson and undoubtedly my last.

Good points first. The phone is small and sits comfortably in the palm of your hand. That's the main reason I bought it. The battery life is excellent, I'm very impressed with the life of the battery considering the size of the phone.

Now the bad points! I've had a brief flirtation with a Sony J5 (which I palmed off on the wife) and have had several Nokia's and it has to be said that Nokia is still king of the mobile market in my opinion. I bought the Ericsson because I wanted something different, every man and his dog owns a Nokia! What a mistake. :(

Firstly, text messaging. I find it extremely hard work writing SMS's out on the T20s. There's no predictive text input whatsoever although to be fair, I always disabled this on the Nokia's. The keys aren't intuitive at all. If I wanted to put the number '3' in a text message with a Nokia I know I have to press the '3' key four times. The Ericsson requires numerous presses to get the same result OR you have to keep hold of the '3' key for a second or so and the number appears. Okay, some people will get used to that I guess but I prefer the Nokia way.

Punctuation is a major hassle on the Ericsson. With two or three presses of one key on the Nokia you can get a comma or a full stop. Not so with the Ericsson. 5 presses for comma and 6 for full-stop. I've just had to check to remember how many presses for each! That's not to mention all the other different punctuation marks you may use that are on the same key. Also, if you select 'Send new message' I find that once you've composed the message you wish to send you have the option of either typing in the number you wish to send to or selecting it from the phonebook. Now if there was some phonebook search option it might help but no, you have to wade t
hrough a possible 200 numbers either from A-Z or Z-A!

Another BIG drawback is that there is no 'message received' option like there is on most other mobiles. I now have no idea whether the SMS I have sent has actually appeared on the intended recipients mobile screen.

Talking of screen, it's waaaaay too small, especially for WAP access! Okay, I got spoiled with a Nokia 7110's big screen for WAP sometime prior to this one but this really is the pits for surfing WAP sites. Having said that, the included games seem to work quite well on this screen though I'm not really into playing mobile phone games! :(

I also find the phonebook a nightmare to use! Try entering a new number and it asks what location (1-200) you want to save it to. Great, except it defaults to location number 1 which is the preset answering machine quick dial key. After entering lots of numbers in the phonebook you forget what number entry you are up to so have to guess at an empty location. No doubt my phone book will have many little holes in the 100 - 150 range because I'm having to guess a vacant slot for new numbers nowadays. Okay, I could probably sort this out by viewing and rearranging entries into a better numerical order but it would be far easier if the phone didn't use slot 1 by default. Incidentally, the 200 locations is split 50% on phone memory and 50% on SIM memory (thereabouts). Due to a wrong keypress I now have two copies of every single number to wade through. At least with the 7110 I selected either phone or SIM memory making life easier, the Ericsson combines both and confuses matters.

The ringtones provided can only be described as average and you can't bung a new logo on the screen as easily as you can with the Nokia's (if you can do it at all ?).

All in all I cannot recommend this mobile phone to anybody. It's just too awkward to use if you want to use things like WAP and/or SMS. If you want a
plain vanilla mobile phone then it may be okay but I would look to the Nokia 3310 or similar if that were the case.

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