Recently Lena signed up a new package with Maxis. As a bonus for signing up the 150 package was a free Sony Ericson T700 mobile phone. This hand phone probably retails for below RM1000 so I guess it was a good deal. There were other free phones like Nokia and LG, but the T700 looked the nicest and it was pretty slim too!

LG was hopeless as a phone, as one of Lena’s colleague who got a LG phone hated it, and when she tried to sell it second hand to the mobile phone, no one wanted to take it. That’s how hopeless LG phones were.

The Look

However this Sony Ericson T700 was a different story. It looks real sleek and slim. So after the Maxis packaged was signed up, we waited for about two weeks before receiving the mobile phone. After an overnight charge to boost up the battery power, I decided to plug a SIM card to give it a spin. Since I wasn’t familiar with Sony Ericson, having been exposed to using Nokia and now PDA phones, it was really a steep learning curve trying to get it to work smoothly.

For one, I didn’t like the way the T9 dictionary work with its drop down list of possible word choice in Sony Ericsson. I would have preferred the Nokia T9 style of selecting your preferred word by pressing the asterisk key. In addition I have to get use to the space bar located in the hash key instead of the zero button. I think putting the space key in the zero button would be more conventional as it would follow the standard qwerty keyboard way of arranging the space bar in the middle of the keypad.

No SD data card support

Trust Sony to do things their own way; especially that of their memory cards. It is usually one of the reasons why I shun Sony cameras is that they insist the consumers to use their more expensive memory sticks than the cheaper widely popular SD cards out in the market. (That’s probably why Fujifilm is now providing SD card support in their digital cameras ’cause consumer don’t want to pay for higher accessories like the more expensive xD cards, so why can’t Sony take heed?)

Overall the slimness of the T700 does make the mobile rather fragile. My brother has damage a few of his Sony Ericson phone because of this. However he is a Sony Ericson fan.

Mobile Digital Camera

One thing I like about Sony Ericson mobile phones is that their build in digital mobile camera do take quite good photos. Although the T700 is not build as a mobile camera phone, it is not quite half as bad.

The Sony Ericson T700 is meant to be a general media player mobile phone able to play mp3, take photos or video at the touch of a button. In fact it lived up to its media functionality that the soft key on the left was permanently fixed as a media button on the home display. No matter how I search through the settings, I couldn’t find any that could set it to another function. Lena even quizzed me asking why the media function was more important for me. Actually there were no settings at all that I could find to change the function, I told her. Just too bad.

Not as a PDA Phone

As I was so used to having a PDA phone, I find the lack of available software to increase the phone functionality a bit of a drawback for me. Of course not everybody is so technical savvy and then some would prefer a simple phone that could just make calls and do texting plus the occasional photo taking.

Install Go Bible software using Java

At least I was able to find a Java Bible reading software. It’s called GoBible and it comes with King James Version of the Bible. Though not my favourite translation it was better than nothing. After all the NIV and NKJV versions were copyrighted and thus not freely available. If you need the Apocrypha and Deuterocanonical addition to the KJV Bible, GoBible has it too. Head on to http://gobible.jolon.org to download it. It should work for most Java enabled mobile phones.

Overall Sony Ericson T700 mobile phone

Overall, the phone functions as it should. The slim and sleek design makes it light to carry around, but does made it rather fragile.