My heart was broken by the T610

[This review was updated on July 14th, 2003 and July 29th, 2003 and again on August 10th, 2003. Look for the updates as text in italics, or merely read the updates here. -editor

Sony Ericsson T610As many of you probably know, I have been a long time daily user of the Sony Ericsson T68 series. I had one of the first T68m handsets when they first hit the scene, and upgraded to a first revision T68i when they became available. I have tested and used a lot of handsets, so it says something about the T68 that I am still using one.

For the past few months I have been eagerly anticipating Sony Ericsson's replacement for the T68, the T610. It is beautiful to behold, and packs every feature I want into a device that takes up the same amount of space as my trusty T68i. It seemed that the T610 was destined to be my next phone.

And then I received the first unit. The audio quality was horrendous. I was amazed that so many of the units made it out of the factory with that horrible hissing sound in the speaker. This was not the Ericsson I knew. The company that had long put function above form, making some of the most technically superior handsets on the market, even if they needed to put an external antenna on a handset - because it just worked better.

Back it went. A few weeks later I got the replacement unit. The sound quality seemed fine. But with more time, I found more problems. Less obvious, but major none the less. But I will get to that. First, an overview.

Ketchup time
Sony Ericsson had a bit of catching up to do. The T68, while ground-breaking in its day, was far past its prime and no longer modern. It had a 256 color display, non-polyphonic ringtones, and couldn't play java games. You could attach a camera to it, of course, but other manufacturers had been putting out handsets with built-in cameras for a while. It was catch-up time.

So this is exactly what they did. They took the T68i, with it's nice, if slow, user interface and great Bluetooth system and added what was missing. The small 256 color display became a large 65,000 color unit. The old sound system was replaced with a polyphonic unit. In terms of applications, they added not only Java support, but Mophun application support, too. And let us not forget the internal digital camera that they managed to squeeze into a unit with nearly the same base dimensions as the handset they were replacing.

If it ain't broke....
One of the best things about the T68i for many people was the nearly infallible Bluetooth implementation. The Bluetooth that all other Bluetooth handsets would be measured against. I had a base assumption that the T610 would handle Bluetooth at least as well as the older model did, and in general this is the case. With a minor caveat.

The biggest improvement to the Bluetooth system, in my mind, revolves around support for audio devices. This is also the biggest problem introduced, in a twist of irony. The improvement is that the T610 can support and use multiple headset and handsfree devices without having to set one as being the active device ("set as first", as the T68i puts it). This is great for anybody that has both a headset and a car handsfree system, or just anybody with two or more headsets (like me). To my knowledge, the T610 is the only handset on the market today that can deal with this.

But, as if to somehow keep the cosmic balance intact, there is a down side. The quality of the audio over one of these Bluetooth devices is quite a bit inferior to that of the T68i. There is more crackle, and the overall quality just isn't there. It is a definite step backwards. In the end, I would say that we are worse off than with the T68i. When you consider that a few times I had trouble pairing a new Bluetooth device, it is a definite step back. A retry or, worst case, restart always got past the problem, but it is a problem I never had with my T68i (running the initial version of the T68i firmware still today).

 

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