The Elm

Now that I've had the phone for a day - and just about used all of the features on it - I think I'm in a position to give it a review. Overall, I am very impressed, as I said yesterday. There are a few things which seem a little bit odd and could do with a bit more thought. My main gripe is that the social networking integration leaves a lot to be desired. You can access Twitter, Facebook and MySpace through the home screen however, this is shown not as a separate app but just shows the feed of updates / tweets. There appears to be no way to update your own status / tweet / view profiles and pictures etc however, you can access the photos by going to your photo album (where you would expect to find your photos and those stored on the phone). Here there are options for many more social networks including flickr, picasa and blogger and if you want to include a picture, there is an option to send a tweet, create a blog or send the photo to facebook. You would think that if they can provide the facility to update with a picture then you should be able to update without a picture?

Moving to a more positive note, the battery life is incredible. Despite taking pictures, using 3G, WiFi and generally using the phone quite a lot; the battery is still at about 60%. I suppose the eco element of the phone requires it to be energy efficient. Back to another downside, the signal always seems to be relatively low in comparison with my old phone. It still seems to connect okay but the level is more often in the red than it is in the green. This could be because my old phone either had incredibly strong reception or was slightly misleading. I am tempted to say the latter because it is an old phone but I do remember it having a much stronger signal that that of my friends in the same venues. Whether it would have connected a call or not in these circumstances, I cannot say as I am not a very heavy user of the phone other than the odd text message.

So far it seems that there are more downsides than upsides and so I would like to take this opportunity to dispel that. This is a fantastic phone and it is very versatile. Sony have continued to ditch their propitiatory formats and this phone takes micro SD cards rather than Sony's M2 card meaning you can expand the memory to store more photos and music on the phone. It also supports Java applications of which there are thousands for almost anything you can think of and if you are a developer, you can create you own very easily.