Great Phone, Great Price (Sony Ericsson T300)

Member Name: hawx

Product:	Sony Ericsson T300
Date:	25/02/03 (1550 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Long Battery Life, Colour Screen, MMS, Polyphonic Ringtones, Tri-Band

Disadvantages: Slow software, Hard to find accessories

If you are looking for a new phone on a budget then you can't really go far wrong with one of these. I've had mine for four months now and am very happy with its performance. When you get the phone you get a choice of three colours of front fascia; green, red, and blue (in order of how easy they are to come by; personally I've never seen the blue one despite it being the most common picture of the phone on the internet). These are replaceable but I have yet to find any accessories or other fascias for this phone yet, though some T68 accessories (standard handsfree kit, car charger etc) are compatible.

Firstly, lets talk cost. You can pick up one of these usually for free on a new 12 month subscription connection to any of the major networks, and they are very cheap on upgrade too. You can get it bundled with the SonyEricsson MCA-25 camera for a very reasonable price both on contract and prepay too.

The first thing that struck me about the phone was the price; £150 offline for a new tri-band SonyEricsson phone with colour screen, MMS and polyphone ringtones? There must be a catch... And after using it for all this time I can happily say there's not. Well, nothing major anyway. I wouldn't recommend getting this phone if picture quality is a very high priority, as any pictures that it receives have their colours dithered down to a palette of 256, rather than the 65,000 that a lot of the new Nokias have. This aside, the display is bright and colourful. You can set any of the built-in pictures as the backdrop wallpaper on the phone, meaning it will be sitting there behind prettily your network name, and battery and reception levels. The screen times out to a screensaver of a clock after a few seconds to save the battery, which it must do a good job of, as the battery will typically last a good week or so after being charged! You can receive pictures with this phone either via the new MMS messaging, or (and this is one it has over th
e new Nokias) through the infra-red. So if you know anyone with another SonyEricsson or Nokia that can send pictures then you can get them onto your T300 for free and avoid the whole MMS thing entirely.

In terms of the more practical features, the phone's call quality is good. There is a volume slider on the side of the phone that takes a while to get used to if you are used to the volume buttons on Nokias. The text messaging is a standard predictive T9 affair that is used by a lot of manufacturers, but again this is different to the Nokia "standard". It took me quite a long time to get used to the new method, as I was previously using a Nokia 8210. The software is also pretty slow when writing a text message which is quite annoying when you've written a fair bit only to fudge up a word and you have to wait for it to all appear on screen before going back to delete it... which in itself takes quite a lot of time too.

Now, polyphonic ringtones. Not everyone is fond of these, but in my opinion any way of getting away from the repetitive standard monophonic bleepings of "Stan" or "Gotta Get Thru This" is a step in the right direction. The polyphonic ringtones that come with this phone are nothing short of fantastic; not only are they well composed and interesting but they are fairly loud too, though if you are like me you'll want the loudest one possible and go for one of the monophonic selections. There is also a vibrate feature with this phone which is strong and easy to feel in your pocket.

On the data side of things, you have the infra red port as mentioned previously, WAP and GPRS all built in. The tri-band feature works well as I can testify after having used it both in Europe and New York. There really is little difference between this and its elder brother, the T68 / T68i.

So there we go. If you fancy getting something a little snazzier for your next phone but don't fancy the high
price of phones like the Nokia 7210 then this could well be the handset for you.

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