Hanging on the telephone

[venta]

My mobile phone is beginning to disintegrate - if you ring me up, and you can hear me but I don't be able to hear you, then don't worry. This is currently one of its normal modes of operation. Some of the keys stick, and it crashes occasionally.

Yesterday I ran Vodafone to see what they might offer me as an upgrade. I can have another Motorola (no thanks, I'd rather use some tin cans and a bit of string), a Sharp (plausible) or the one I'm currently favouring, a Sony Ericsson V800.

Has anyone out there got a V800, or used one in anger ? Got anything to say about it ?

It seems to satisfy my major requirements, ie it's clamshell, it should function as a modem, it has an infrared port (woo, wasn't expecting that one), and it appears to make calls and send messages. I might like the buttons to be bigger (there's all that space, why make them so damn small!?) and I've heard reports from one user that the camera isn't nearly as good as you'd expect for 1.3 megapixel. The phone itself is pretty ugly, but then I think that about most phones - I have no idea why phone designers can't make a sensible, nice-looking unit any more.

I'd like to know if the V800's PC synchronisation stuff is any cop. And indeed whether it would actually do what it says (unlike my current phone, which doesn't do what it says.)

My memories of my last Sony Ericsson phone suggest that the predictive text should be competent (unlike the prediction on my current Motorola which sucks donkeys). The games stuff, downloadable ringtones, blah de blah de blah I don't give a flying stuff about.

Comments

[elethiomel.livejournal.com]

I have a V800 and I rather like it. It does everything you could reasonably expect of a phone and lots of other stuff too, is not so tiny that you can lose it behind a packet of fags and has a certain retro stylishness (to my mind).

The camera seems okay. It's only 1.3 Megapixels but it seems pretty okay. I haven't tried video calling yet (I only know one other person with a 3G phone, so haven't had the opportunity) but the general video / audio quality is pretty good.

Positive things: It has the standard Ericsson menu structure / texting etc. which is pretty intuitive and which I like. And yes, the predictive text is about 500 years ahead of Motorola's. I find
Bluetooth is useful, too. Finally, the camera also has an extremely powerful halogen lamp, which is pretty funky.

The only negative thing I can think to say about it is that I don't think it has anywhere near the 270 hours standby time the literature claims - not if you do anything other than leave it on a shelf and don't touch it, anyway. The camera seems to drain the battery pretty fast, too. Even so, you can reasonably expected to get four or five days out of it, so it isn't too bad.

I managed to get the phone free and get 500 anytime any network minutes, 100 texts and 50 mins video calls for £40 per month, so it's well worth it, in my opinion.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

The camera seems to drain the battery pretty fast, too.

It's probably writing the images to memory that's drawing a lot of power - flash is quite greedy compared with most other things a phone does. Although, "halogen lamp"?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, given that we have a history of liking the same phones, I'll take that as a positive sign :)