Apr 23, 2007 04:47 PM
3466 Views
I know this review is coming quite late for this model, but I just thought I would voice my frustration anyway. Hopefully the folks at Sony Ericsson are paying attention to this board and would improve on the quality of their future products.
The main reason I bought this phone over two years ago is its small size which makes it convenient to carry around. But that was a big mistake I made. They claimed a talk time of more than 3 hours, but I hardly got more than 1 hour even in the beginning. The talk time was better wth a single long call than multiple calls spread over. Even when not being used, I needed to charge it on almost a daily basis.(I could go for 3 days without charging with my previous Nokia 2600.) I checked the battery, it was new and nothing seemed to be wrong with it.
Soon after I bought it, I discovered that the software would keep freezing/crashing almost once every couple of days. I got frustrated that I took it to their service centre in B'lore. They updated the software which improved it somewhat but still crashes continued to occur from time to time, something which had never occured with the Nokia.
Even if you leave out the crashes, the software is quite buggy. The call list would leave out some calls for some reason, or change the order of the calls. I prefer Nokia where each call(either incoming or outgoing) has a time stamp even if it is days old. With the J200i(and probably other SE models), the time is shown only for the calls made on that day, and for all calls made in previous days, only the date is given. This is painful, since if you want to call back someone who had called you a few days ago, you aren't sure which number it is unless you also have a rough idea of the time you received the call. This is compounded by the fact that the call order gets frequently jumbled and you could end up calling an unintended number because of this.
The other complaints are, scrolling the phone book is painfully slow and overshoots even after stopping the navigation key. Then as someone else mentioned, you might accidentally press down the nav key when trying to scroll up or down. This is dangerous when you are sending an SMS as you could accidentally end up sending the message to the wrong person if you are not careful. Plus scrolling up with this nav key is rather clumsy and difficult compared to the push down style navigator. I have sworn never to buy a phone in the future with this kind of a nav key.
The "delete all" option for message folders for some reason doesn't seem to do what it says. A few messages sometimes remain undeleted. I don't know what SE's software QA department is doing. If they miss such obvious bugs, they deserve to get fired.
SMSing is ok, but why the hell did they decide to put the number 1 at the back of the punctuation list? If you need to enter "1", you need to press the "1" button 13 times! Again this might be common to more SE phones, so SE, please take note!
I have had enough of this phone that I am shopping for a replacement. This time I prefer to go with a Nokia, something with a camera. I was looking at the Nokia 5300, a slider phone which is actually shorter than the J200i(can you believe that?), although a bit wider. I might also check out some MotoRazr models. I am not even looking in the direction of SE anymore.
