I was just reading Raven Zachary’s blog about his woes with T-Mobile and AT&T Wireless Cingular AT&T Wireless. Interesting read. I fully agree with one of his comments. Beware of going to a AT&T dealer and not to the company store. The dealer could likely make all kinds of promises none of which would be honored by the company. In my case I had to move my company-owned cell connection to my personal account. I was told by the dealer everything would be the same (including the expiration dates of my previous contracts) and, of course, I was getting a better deal because he had bumped me to a more economical plan. 3 months later, after much heartburn I realized it was not true. Lock-in is the mantra for all cell phone providers. I have been an AT&T/Cingular customer for the last 7 years not necessarily by choice. The sheer task of looking for an alternative is so daunting that I give up every time I think of it.

Sony Ericsson W810i Walkman Phone

I had to replace my Palm Treo 600 but needed to stick with my Cingular service. Don’t ask me why, I HAD to!. I could have gone to a normal Cingular store (as in company-owned store) but decided to try a Cingular dealer only because they were closer to my office.

The store layout was an excellent example of utilizing a lot of space to show nothing much. After all, most cell phone stores in the USA belong to one cell phone company or another. Even if one were to create a superstore a la the big box retailers such as Walmart, Best Buy, Circuit City the whole thing would probably fit within a 30′x30′ area. Meanwhile, the place was manned by just two persons, one of whom appeared to be significantly more knowledgeable and customer-oriented than the other. This person, who it turned out, was a visiting regional sales manager for the chain of dealer stores, and I spent a considerable amount of time doing something relatively trivial. I needed to pull out my phone number from its existing plan that belonged to my company and switch it to my personal pre-existing Cingular account. That process, including the time it took for me to get the regional managers undivided attention took 2 hours. I kid you not. However, this blog entry is not about my travails regarding switching my service but about the Sony Ericsson phone. I finally got around to seeing the various phones that were available. I decided on the W810i only because 1) I liked the camera resolution (3.1 megapixels) and 2) It had a Memory Stick Pro Duo slot. I have a Sony PSP and had recently purchased a 2 GB stick so I had a spare 1 GB Memory Stick to use.

But what about the price you ask? Well, it cost me a cool $220 bucks. Very expensive, particularly since this was not even the latest Walkman phone. But of course, one does not harbor such ambitions when one lives in the US. Those are best left for people in Europe or Asia. Maybe even Africa but I am not sure.

Anyhow, coming to the phone itself. Let’s start with the camera. It works fine in daylight but is terrible under artificial lights. The camera does not have a built-in flash, only a bright LED light. This is not sufficient for taking decent pictures unless you ensure that the subjects of your pictures remain very still and really bring them up close to whatever artificial indoor lighting there is available. I took some pictures of my son while we were visiting with relatives in Florida this Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, I decided to take the pictures inside a dimly lit restaurant. The pictures were anything but good.

As for the phone, I am slowly getting around to learning about the various keys and shortcuts. I wish they had built a bigger screen although I like the resolution. As for the keyboard, that really is one of the problems with this sort of phone. It tries to keep it within the structure of a general telephone for alphanumeric dialing. But what it ends up doing is make life miserable for SMS, emails and web browsing, particularly entering web addresses.

What I like the most is the Walkman feature. With my 1 gig memory stick inside (it comes with a paltry 16 MB memory stick) I use it as my primary podcast player. These days I drive 90 minutes each way to and from work. I have it hooked up to an FM transmitter that plugs in to my car’s 12V input. Makes for a great audio player. But Sony has messed up big time on the software I use to transfer files to and from the camera. Transfers take place in slow motion and I really need to give myself plenty of time if I have to upload new podcasts in the morning. It is very irritating to have to wait for 20 minutes to get my 4 hours worth of MP3 podcasts. I have to find a way to either improve the speed or get the podcasts to automatically load onto my memory card overnight, a la the iPod.

The sound recording feature is quite neat as are some of the built-in applications for music creation. The DJ is a good application and I played with it to create my own unique ringtone from a combination of built-in rythms and sounds.

I still have not used some of the other multimedia features of the device yet. Using them under my current data plan would not be the smartest thing to do. Hopefully I will be able to provide an update once I get a new plan from Cingular.