Fans of clamshell phones may feel a touch hard done by when it comes to Sony Ericsson. Despite some desirably stylish Walkman and Cyber-shot designs, the real style icons to date have tended to be candybars. The Z770i is its attempt to redress the balance. It's constructed with a smart, elegant look rather than brash style- …

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Tuesday 6th May 2008 13:26 GMT Anonymous Coward

Partial Review

Once again, another 'Register' mobile phone review which makes no comment whatsoever on the phones PC/Mac connectivity options and performance via Bluetooth or USB.

The first thing most people want to do with a new phone is get some stuff onto it - usually as least Contacts and Calendars, but also Music etc.

How does the supplied software perform? Is it easy to sync your Contacts and Calendars to the phone? What about transferring music to the phone, or photo's off it?

Fortunately, I use a Mac, and was syncing Contacts and Calendars to my Z770i within minutes of turning it on, using an iSync Plugin from www.feisar.com.

I don't really understand how a 'review' can completely omit to mention an important part of the whole mobile phone using experience. Perhaps you still enter all your contacts by hand?

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Tuesday 6th May 2008 13:26 GMT eddiewrenn

All-in-one

Although the Xperia looks promising, c'mon Sony, produce a phone that brings the best of all your phones together - the market's all about convergence and best technologies, but you keep separating your 'markets' out. My last five phone's have been SE, but if I was upgrading today I'd probably look elsewhere.

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Tuesday 6th May 2008 14:01 GMT Jerome

Convergence

@ eddiewrenn - couldn't agree more. We want a phone with a high quality camera AND a decent music player (preferably with a proper headphone socket). A nice big touch screen for internet browsing wouldn't go amiss either. We want one phone that does everything, not pockets stuffed full of devices.

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Tuesday 6th May 2008 14:57 GMT Tony Smith, Editor, Reg Hardware

@AC, re. partial reviewage

Fair point, AC, but I think World+Dog has established how phone interact with PCs, and Mac users have come to expect they'll often need to do a bit of iSync tweaking to support new handsets - or buy a third-party plug in, as you did.

There's little point rehashing coverage of, say, Sony Ericsson's PC software *every* time we review an SE product. Even more so all the phones that just use Microsoft's ActiveSync.

These days, this stuff works, and while Vendor A's software may be slightly better than Vendor B's, no one's going to buy Vendor A's phone solely as a result of that.

So, instead, we focus on the more tangible reasons that punters *do* buy phones for, though we'll always point it out if a Bluetooth sub-system is below par, or there's an obvious issue with content syncing.

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Wednesday 7th May 2008 09:56 GMT Anonymous Coward

@Tony Smith: partial reviewage

Tony, I'm glad for you that you happen to know that:

"These days, this stuff works, and while Vendor A's software may be slightly better than Vendor B's, no one's going to buy Vendor A's phone solely as a result of that."

...but some of us don't (or didn't) know that. I'm a SE user with no idea how good Nokia or Sanyo's Mac connectivity (say) is.

A brief reminder of what the problems/issues/limitations are each time would still help us, and would keep your reviewers honest (they'd have to check for improvements and new limitations). It is, as yer man said, a major part of the functionality. (If, as an example, a phone's PC software requires XP SP2, say, tell us - I know people unable to upgrade from SP1, for whom such a phone would be useless.)

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Tuesday 13th May 2008 13:26 GMT Anonymous Coward

more: partial review

Posting as AC as I used to work for Motorola and don't want to get into a slagging match.

I think that if you're of the opinion that syncing just works then you haven't tried hard enough, and in particular you haven't used Motorola's offering! They still use their own app which is the slowest most pants solution ever. I have little doubt that it works on a virgin install but you try making the damn thing work once your data's been on a few phones and you're trying to wipe, resync etc...

And whilst I'm having a bitch about syncing, does any one else have a problem with

Google Calender -> GCal daemon -> Mac cal -> N95 syncing?

In my experience it can't tell two, day long, events apart on the same day if you delete one and then add a completely separate new one. I'm pointing my finger at the Nokia isync plug-in as the damned mystery event only appears on the N95 having been expunged from Google calendar and Mac Cal bloody ages ago.

/rant

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