I got a new mobile phone on Thursday! A Sony Ericsson s700i. Initial impressions are very good, a hell of a lot better than my old Motorola v525, but there are still a few niggles, and it annoys me that mobile phone manufacturers still seem incapable of getting to grips with simple ergonomics.
My biggest annoyance so far, and this may sound petty, is the camera noise. I have a choice of three different shutter-click or beepy-type noises to fire off every time I take a photo. But why the hell should I want one of these? So far I’ve been unable to find a way of switching them off (I suppose I could probably put the phone on silent mode, but I’d rather just have the shutter silent whatever mode I’m in). Admittedly, part of the reason I want to do this is so that I can take sneaky shots in art galleries and museums without attracting the ire of nearby curators (I was recently politely ushered out of the White Cube for daring to take photos of the works on display. As it turned out – karma – none of my pictures came out). Perhaps Sony Ericsson have put this “feature” in to stop people taking illicit shots in school changing rooms etc, but I think it more likely they’ve just forgotten that some of us don’t like sounds to accompany every little thing we do.
My other really big annoyance is the headphones – they are the annoying in-ear type which never actually fit in your ear. I find myself having to either hold them in physically, or stuff them back into my ear every five seconds or so, and I already lost one of the foam coverings only one day after getting the phone. Last time I bought something made by Sony (a Clié PEG-N770 PDA) it came with a beautiful set of clip-on headphones, probably the best personal stereo headphones I have ever owned. If they supply them with MP3 playing PDAs, why can’t they provide something similar for this MP3 playing phone?
The other annoying thing about the headphones… wires! Really badly tangly ones at that. I’ve tried curling them up into a nice neat loop, but they seem to have an inbuilt tangling mechanism which means that every time I go to put them on, I have to put everything else down and spend about a minute detangling the wires before I can get them in my ears (for five seconds, after which as I mentioned, they drop out again). The phone has Bluetooth, there are mono Bluetooth headsets available for it, but not only did it not come with Bluetooth headphones, it seems that there are no Bluetooth stereo headphones available for this type of phone. And, of course, because it has a non-standard Sony Ericsson connector, I can’t just go out and buy another set of headphones. God, they could even just have put some little winding device on the wires, so I could store them away safely between uses, but even that it seems was beyond them. I would love to use this phone all the time as an MP3 player and radio, but the crap headphones mean I will probably use that function for a week or so and then give up in despair.
Interface and OS-wise, the phone is a big improvement over my last Sony Ericsson (a T610) and for the most part over my Motorola, although the OS is still a bit sluggish at times and there are some areas where Motorola beat Sony-Ericsson hands down, in particular text entry and the most-recently-called list. The alarms application is the same as the old T610 one: better than Motorola in that you can specify which days of the week you want your alarm to go off on, worse in that you can only have one recurrent alarm and you can’t give it a name.
I still reach occasional points in the system when I think “why can’t I do this with this” (or more likely “why can I do this with this from that screen, but not from this one), all the dots are not yet joined up; again things have improved since the T610, but I would have thought that any usability expert worth their salt could have sat down, produced a map of functions, and got Sony Ericsson to implement all the right ones in all the right places. If they’re willing to bung me five grand I’ll do it for them; but then I made a similar offer over the horrendously designed and architected Sony website(s), and they haven’t yet taken me up on it (and their websites are as clunky and hard to navigate as ever).
Back to the camera, it’s a very nice little toy. It will probably stop me from buying a new camera for a little while, as I now have something which fits in my pocket that I can use for snapshots. It’s 1280×960 resolution, which is the same size I normally set my five-year-old F505V to, though my old camera has a much better CCD and pictures from this phone are noticeably (even to me) worse quality; also, the shutter speed seems very slow: even in fairly decent light I have to make a real effort to hold the camera steady if I want to avoid my pictures coming out as a complete blur. It is, like I said, a toy rather than a real camera, but I think I’m going to find it a fairly useful toy. The other good thing is that it has a lens cover, which none of my previous camera phones have had, so I should be able to avoid pictures becoming a mess of fluff and scratches within a couple of days of owning the phone. If, that is, I remember to close the lens cap after I use it; there’s no guarantee of that. I was also annoyed that the phone didn’t come with some sort of pouch: I can see that lovely shiny screen descending into a mess of scratches within a few days travelling in my pockets.
Still, I probably sound more negative about this phone than I feel right now: I’m very excited about my new toy, and can’t wait to get out and about and show it off a little 
