This column gets several emails inquiring about good but reasonably priced mobile phones. Last week we got Sony Ericsson T630 phone. Though this phone is at end of its product life cycle and on verge of being phased out it is worth attention due to low price point it has reached for what it offers. Also after officially it is phased out expect it to be popular model just like even today Nokia 6310i is sought after by power users.

For around US$200 street price it offers features which would rival phones costing more then US$300 from competitors like Nokia. Quality of phone is very superior. It is tri-band phone so will work in most countries in world where either of 900/1800/1900MHz band is used.

Implementation of Bluetooth is best you will ever see. Bluetooth has always been strong point of Sony Ericsson phones partly because Bluetooth technology was founded by Ericsson before it merged with Sony. It features all Bluetooth profiles including OBEX synchronization for address book backup to MS Outlook, File Transfer to add/remove files to phones like pictures, ringtones, games etc. Because it features full Bluetooth functionality, you don’t need any additional software to make it talk to your PC/Mac or any other computer. This phone worked well with Jabra FreeSpeak 250, Plantronics M3500, M3000, M2500 and Nextlink AX Bluetooth headsets. One can also use PC with microphone and speaker as handsfree kit especially when conferencing or wanting to record conversation on PC. This phone lacks speaker phone. Phone volume though is very loud and clear, signal strength is best, even in darkest spots of city you will not drop calls. If you like to work from PC to send SMS, keep backup of all your sent and received SMS this phone will work fine with Mobile Phone Tools from www.BVRP.com or MOBILEdit from www.mobiledit.com .

This phone when it was introduced a year back for US$375 was noticed for its cute and smart design. It’s handy, big bright TFT active matrix 128x160 pixel screen allows you to do smsing, wap surfing without straining eyes or scrolling too much. Instead of 4 direction buttons this phone uses joystick to move around. Keypad is big, keys are backlit. Phone weighs 92.5 gram with battery. Battery is Li-Polymer 770 mAh and lasts much longer then most color phones. In test it lasted 2 days or more with moderate use with bluetooth on all time. Camera is very low resolution at 288x352 pixels. Design of phone has dual personality, it looks like regular vertical phone from front and looks like regular horizontal camera on back.

It supports 32 voices polyphony and you can get 1000s of free ringtones or themes from sites like www.myt630.net .

Address book on phone can store 510 numbers apart from one on your SIM card. Phone has 2MB memory which is used for some of games/themes on phone which can be deleted to make more room for pictures.

GPRS is Multislot class 8 (4+1) and on Orange network it gave speed varying from 35Kbps to 48Kbps. WAP browser is 2.0 with XHTML supports which means you will be able to go thru WAP and surf many HTML sites meant for PDA. If you bookmark Yahoo's mail's inbox page as start/home page, you can access your emails just with press of single button on side of phone "ONLINE", poor man's blackberry.

Overall this phone is good buy at current price if you don’t need high quality camera, EDGE and speaker phone.

Vipul Shah
guide@vipulshah.com