I bought a Sony Ericsson P800 in October 2003 and I have mixed feelings about it.

At the time of purchase, I thought the sun shone from the behind of this phone but since then I have discovered one or two gripes with it, so this is a kind of good vs evil review of the P800.

First I'll start with the good points. Basically, the phone is a good phone packed with both useful and not to useful features. It comes equipped with a camera which is always handy. The pictures aren't brilliant but they are about as good as most camera phones.

The phone also has both bluetooth and infra red which makes for both easy and cheap exchanging of pictures and stuff. You can also make a bluetooth connection between the phone and your PC which is handy for putting ringtones, pictures, WAV's, documents, utilities and documents on your phone. You can also synchronise your phone with your computer too so that all of your tasks, contacts, schedules and emails can be on your computer and your phone. Another communication feature is the fact that you can back your phone up onto your PC so if anything goes wrong with the phone and you lose everything, you'll be able to restore it all from your computer.

One of my favourite things is the phone's flexibility and range of files that you can have on it. You can download stuff from the net and transfer it to your phone either by bluetooth or cable. At the moment I've got a Sega Emulator and games, A Gameboy emulator and games, Lemmings game, Tetris game, a video camera, a music player and some other stuff. You can even transfer video from your computer to the phone, and the fact that you've got 8mb of internal and a 16mb memory card with the phone means you can store quite a bit on it. You can also buy bigger memory cards too so the fun is endless!!

Let's talk ringtones now. The phone comes equipped with a number of polyphonic tones which are cool but what's really c
ool is that you can download any midi file from your computer and make it your ringtone. But wait, whats even cooler than that is the fact that you can have WAV files as ringtones too. You'll need a converter on your PC to reduce the size of the WAV which generally means lower quality but you can hardly notice the difference. At the moment I've got a 4 minute song thats only 1.2mb as my ringtone!

The schedule feature on the phone is very useful too. I write all my schedule information on my pc then synchrnonise it with the phone so that it all transfers across.

The phone also comes equipped with a document viewer which means you can view word, excel and powerpoint documents on your computer. Very handy for all you executive types out there, but pretty useless to me!

I haven't even mentioned the thing that'll blow yer socks of yet! One word - Touchscreen!
Yes, this phone has touchscreen but don't run out and buy one until you've finished reading and rated my review though ;-) The phone's keypad flips down and you have a little stick to tap stuff into the phone. Touchscreen menus are useful and the fact that you can write on the screen using the stick and the phone recognises the text is cool too.

Now I've hammered on about the good points, now for the negatives. There aren't that many really but here goes.

Size - this phone is BIG and very uncomfortable when you're on a night out and you've got it in your jeans pocket. I was forced to go out and buy another, smaller phone to take out.

Another negative is the battery life, it aint that good! Plus, when you're using some applications and you don't exit them properly they will continue to run in the background thus killing the battery quickly. The bluetooth is a big battery drain too so don't leave it on all the time.

My last gripe is random crashes. Now I don't know if it's just my phone bu
t about once a week the phone crashes and I get a warning sign telling me I need to switch it off and back on. This does not come in handy if it happens through the night and you're relying on the alarm to wake you up for work!

All in all, I would always recommend buying this phone if you don't mind the size or battery life, but for me it's the size thats the problem. Negatives apart it is a really good phone and definately one to look at. Although the P800 now has a bigger brother, the P900. I haven't seen this phone so can't review it but I'm sure it'll be on Dooyoo!