My Phone Book

I believe the expression “Sony guts” would apply here. Though very different on the outside, Sony Ericsson’s T610 and T616 candy bar phones share the same specs with the Z600 flip. And really, the only thing separating the T610 and T616 is the 900Mhz compatible radio in the former, and 850MHz support for the latter.

I personally owned all three. I sold my T616 but never found another home for my T610, shown above. And who’s that dashing young man I’ve got in my wallpaper? Here’s a hint.

I didn’t just trick out my T610 with wallpapers, ringtones and games… I also bought this tricked-out Bluetooth-controlled car. You could drive it via the joystick on your phone, barely. And what really sucked was that the car would only take a charge from the phone, sucking up precious battery.

Back to the phone, you can read Steve Punter’s February, 2004 review of the Fido-branded T616 here.

The strip of photos above (via this Korean blog) pretty much shows you that the Z600 was all about the changeable covers. I’ve still got a couple in my drawer, along with that game controller.

You can see MobileBurn’s gallery of the controller (and car)  here, and their review of the Z600 here.

If you were wondering how photos were from either camera, well… they were exactly like this.

Years later I would come to appreciate the power and flexibility of the Symbian mobile OS. But UIQ, Sony Ericsson’s fork of Symbian, was pretty much a non-starter for me. My one and only UIQ smartphone was the P800; I trialled it for about a week in the summer of 2003.

One of the reasons I didn’t keep it was the price tag: nine hundred and fifty Canadian dollars. I think it was my Treo that instilled in me the optimal price point for one of these high-functioning handsets; even today, I’m loathe to pay more than five hundred bucks for one. And Fido offered no subsidies for the P800, as it was very much a niche device.

I might have given the P800 more consideration had it a proper qwerty keypad. Using the number pad for anything other than entering phone numbers was decidedly unpleasant. The touchscreen underneath had built-in handwriting recognition that didn’t work at all for me — I would have much preferred something more familiar, like Palm’s Graffiti alphabet. Instead, I had to make do poking at an on-screen keyboard with the included snap-on stylus. Not fun.

But the biggest problem with Sony Ericsson’s first-ever smartphone was that it had no options to sync data to my Macintosh computer. Remember that I’ve only ever wanted two things from my mobile phone, and one of them was the ability to share a single address book. Though Apple at the time was doing very well with iPods, its desktop computer OS was dwarfed by Microsoft Windows in the Americas, and more so in Europe. I wasn’t about to buy a new computer just for a phone (at least not yet) and to manually write phone numbers to my SIM card would be an instant regression back to the stone age, and an immediate deal-breaker.

The best thing the P800 had going for it was its integrated VGA camera. I decided that my next mobile would be also a camera phone, and sure enough, it was…

Here’s Sony Ericsson’s first smartphone, the P800 — which I trialled for about a week in June, 2003. A gallery of photos taken with the VGA camera ’round back was one of the last things I posted on my first-ever blog. These two press photos were pooched from PDAStreet.

Note that the number pad was on a hinged panel that could be folded down or taken off completely, revealing a touch-screen underneath. The phone was powered by UIQ, Sony Ericsson’s fork of the Symbian mobile operating system. Years later I would come to appreciate the power of Symbian and S60, but back then I remember a distinct lack of sync options for Macintosh computers. Also, this beast of a phone had a price tag to match.

Here’s Steve Punter’s review of the P800 from December, 2003.

Handspring’s second-generation Treo 600 promised to be a big improvement over my first-gen 270, with a sturdy candy bar design replacing the admittedly flimsy flip. But by the spring of 2003 it still hadn’t come to market, and the wait was killing me. The Palm/Handspring operating system had proved its mettle for smartphones, so I ponied up for the rather expensive Palm Tungsten T and found a a suitable Bluetooth-enabled handset to pair it with. That phone was the Sony Ericsson T68i.

Sony had already been making their own handsets — at least for the UK market — for quite some time. Their join venture with Ericsson was inked in 2001 but the T68i, the combined company’s first product, took almost two years to make its way to Canada. Its standout feature, apart from the joystick-type thingy used to navigate through the on-screen icons, was an available camera accessory that you plugged in to the bottom of the phone.

It was an expensive add-on that I honestly never even bothered with; in fact, this particular phone/PDA combo lasted maybe a week before I sent both back to their respective stores. In theory, using a phone as a Bluetooth modem was a godsend. One could enjoy the mobile Internet on an expansive touch-enabled screen while the signal source was tucked away in a pocket. In practice, though, this setup was a pain. A constant Bluetooth connection easily halved the battery life of both devices; your only other choice was to pair and un-pair them throughout the day.

I vowed that I would never again separate PDA from phone. My next device would prove it…

Here’s the best photo I could find of Sony Ericsson’s first handset, the T68i — via this Chinese image site.

This particular phone is legendary enough to merit a rather substantial Wikipedia entry. I already knew that this refreshed Ericsson T68 was the first product of the Sony-Ericsson partnership, but here’s something I didn’t know:

The T68i was the first Ericsson (Sony) free from brominated flame retardants (BFRs).

Take that, brominated flame retardants (BFRs)…

You can check the specs on GSM Arena here and read Steve Punter’s review from December, 2001 here. Oh, and apparently MobleBurn was publishing reviews back then too!

Note that I only had this phone for about a week in May of 2003, so my chapter about it may end up being as brief as this database entry.