Here’s a quick take on my new T610 phone: it’s fine so far and it has some nice qualities. I was looking for something that was:
- Small
- Bluetooth
- Decent user interface
- Synch with Outlook contacts
I got all that, and with the rebate I get back $20 on top of the price of the phone, with a plan from T-Mobile here in NYC. Read on for a brief review of the phone.
Forget the camera — I wish they had a model without one, but it comes along and you get the ability to take grainy little snapshots. I figure I’ll try to delete whatever I can from the default images and sounds to make some more space once I get the OBEX service working from my laptop over Bluetooth.
Getting the phone synched was a major pain because the IR link seems flakey and the software that comes bundled (XTNDConnect PC) is really really weak. I spent a bunch of time getting the Bluetooth working so I could synch over that, but that’s another story — a long and painful one that’s not finished yet. I was surprised to find that my contacts (several hundred of them) had made it into the phone, and my one big beef is that it does not allow you to search by more than the first letter of the name. Don’t these phone companies do any user testing??? I need to be able to type a few letters and see only the names that start with those letters. In 1999, my Qualcomm phone could do that.
One of the nicest things about the phone for me is that there’s an email client built in with IMAP support (!) which works wonderfully in conjunction with T-Mobile’s t-zones service. So for $5/month I can get all my email on my phone. Not for serious reading and writing, but totally workable and quite fast.
I am thinking about whether to go for the $20/month option to get all-you-can-eat GPRS data on the phone, and then use BT to the laptop or iPAQ for anytime access anywhere. But the truth is I just don’t need it, and BT is proving to be a major pain to configure.
So I’d say the phone is pretty good, especially for less than $0. The included earbud is workable, but the non-standard plug for it is a problem because I’d rather use my standard micro-plug Plantronics and can’t. I’m thinking about a BT headset ;-)
Reviews I read said battery life was poor — and so far I’m not impressed with it but it seems no worse than my Motorola V60 was.
Related posts: