This phone has excellent functionality, and is fairly practical to use for basic functions like texting and calls.

The camera is excellent, and at 8.1 megapixels, it is still top of the range for mobile phones. It produces well balanced photos in terms of contrast and colour, and the more recent versions even include intelligent focus finding and stitched panoramic photography. While compared to a compact camera there is the inevitable slight time lag to switch to camera mode and take the picture, it is fast for a mobile, and offers a good alternative to taking a separate camera out for nearly all occassions.

Likewise, the built in speaker produces excellent sound that remains equal to more recent products, and makes this a better choice for music that many of the Walkman phones.

In terms of day to day practicality, the number keys are buttons, though the layout is perhaps not quite as comfortable as a bar type phone. However, the large screen helps to compensate for this, especially for sending picture messages.

The longevity in my personal experience was ok, took a little over a year before the first problems cropped up, which were that the phone would not playback any sound through the earpiece speaker for phonecalls, and certain keys on the keypad became unresponsive. However, the second hand replacement (which is the newer version) has been working for several months without any problems at all.