The first UNfavourable review of this phone - and a complete contrast to others' experiences, from the looks of it. I have a Sony J70e from Orange - I don't know if the "e" makes a difference but from the photo & descriptions in the other reviews it seems to be the same model. I got mine free on upgrading and extending my Orange contract for a year.

It looks nice, shiny silver, and it's fairly small and light, with no visible aerial. That's it. There are some other pros (see below) but those advantages are available on other models/brands, and to me are far outweighed by the cons.

Reasons NOT to get this phone:

- it's very hard to hear anything in all but the most quiet surroundings, even with the volume turned up to max. That's the biggest bugbear for me. What's the point of having a mobile where you can barely hear the person you're trying to talk to?

- handsfree speaker, HAH! It's bad enough trying to hear anything when it's jammed into my ear.

- reception on this model in some areas is very bad. It's the phone not the network. My friend who has the same phone has huge trouble trying to get a signal in Wiltshire on Orange yet her dad who has a Motorola Orange phone in the same house has no difficulty at all.

- you can record your own ringtones but it's hard to record anything which is sufficiently loud to be heard ringing without its sounding distorted, and the inbuilt ringtones are, excuse me, crap. You can't download any new tones, or even enter a sequence of scale tones if you're musically minded.

- the handsfree kit you get for it from Orange (NOT free with the phone, the stingy sods, you have to buy it separately) doesn't work very well, it's crackly and (the old refrain) hard to hear anything on it. I tried a few, but they were all bad.

- the car charger (which again I had to get separately from Orange)
doesn't work at all - I went through 3 different units, including a supposedly upgraded model, before giving up.

- I hate not being able to assign quick-dial codes (where you press a special key then a short number like 2) to exactly the phonebook entries I want. When my SIM card was transferred to the new Sony, it shuffled them into the order it felt like (different from my original order of course, eg I used to have 2 for my home phone, 3 for the office, 4 for my best friend etc), and there is NO way of changing the order short of deleting and re-entering ALL the short code items, no thank you very much. So no more short code dialling, as I don't have time to memorise the new codes.

- for what it's worth, I'm not sure (if there's anything to the microwave risk theory) about the radiation issue. A friend claimed (with another make of mobile phone) that her ear would get hot if she had to use it for more than a few minutes. I always laughed at her because I'd never noticed anything (with previous phones that I used). But with this one, I've noticed my ear getting oddly hot too. Weird that.

Maybe I just got saddled with a duff phone and should try to get it swapped under the guarantee, given that some other people think the sound quality etc is good? No - I got two phones together with my flatmate as part of the deal. Hers is just as bad. I find it hard to believe that BOTH of them are duff. Or maybe it's Orange...?

OK, so it's a WAP phone with decent sized screen, it has a good jog-dial feature which is a clever way of accessing the menu (but nowhere near as intuitive and fast as Nokia menus), it has a reasonable capacity phone book. And there's a way of attaching a picture and short tune (limited ONLY to the ones that come with the phone) to others who have the same phone - but it's no good if they have another make or model of mobile, and you get fed up of the rather naff s
upplied pictures & tunes after a while anyway. Yeah it was free, but you can get m much better phones free with your contract. The standby time and talktime's not bad, but what's the use if you can't hear who you're talking to properly?

I've had Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia phones. I'm never going to try a Sony again (though I might just about consider the joint venture with Ericsson). Face it, most third party accessories (eg neat hand wind-up chargers, downloadable ringtones etc) are going to sell stuff only for those 3 market leading brands. Next upgrade, as soon as my contract expires, I'm switching as fast as I can to one of those - probably Nokia, probably next year's version of the Communicator.