sony ericsson T610

[emailer]

do any of you have this phone and if so, what are your opinions on it (and only it)?

[scatman]

It is an excellent all-rounder. Pretty good camera, bluetooth, infra-red, polyphonics and java games. Call quality is excellent and so is the screen... which leads onto its bad points. The screen in direct sunlight is very hard to see (as you'd expect, but it is worse than most phones), java performance is pretty bad but capable and the menus can be a bit slow. I have also noticed that some text messages cause it to lag too. I do however, have the very first edition of this phone and much of those fault have been rectified in firmware updates. You'll get recent firmware if you buy it new, or it can be updated at service centers. There are also some great sites for T610 games, themes, ringtones and wallpapers (myt610.net, being one) and esato.com has a huge sonyericsson forum full of helpful people =)

[Maxrom]

I got this phone last October, almost a year after the first batches were sold, and I've had no trouble with it at all. I moved to this from a T68i and it was worth the upgrade. My main concern before getting it was the screen - as Scatman says, it is a little dark in direct sunlight, but it's still perfectly useable and no worse than any of the other large colour displays I've seen. I would suggest trying to get hold of a late model with the newer firmware though. The earlier ones sometimes had trouble with screen flicker when playing games, and occasional sound distortion when on a call. Nothing I've experienced on my one, but back in October when I was researching the phone, these problems ranked as the biggest on early models.