Problems with the Sony-Ericsson T610

[coalescent]

1. Punctuating text messages. The text input of the T610 seems to have been designed with the frugal user of punctuation in mind. Pressing the 'punctuation' button only brings up about half the available characters; for anything as wildly esoteric as (say) an asterisk, or quotation marks, you have to navigate through several screens.

2. Memory management. The amount of memory the phone has available for the inbox is somewhat pathetic; it's full when you accumulate 50 messages or so. That's not a problem in itself; what is a problem is that there's no effective way to manage that memory. For example, although there is a 'reply and delete' option, there's no way to configure the phone to use that as the default 'reply' option. Another alternative would be to have an option so you can automatically overwrites the oldest message when the memory is full. Or they could have nuanced the 'delete all' so that you can 'delete all older than 5 days', or 'delete all but most recent 10 messages.' But they did none of these things.

Don't get me wrong, there are lots of nice things about the phone, too - it's just in the details that the user-friendliness falls down somewhat.

Comments

[fba.livejournal.com]

Another alternative would be to have an option so you can automatically overwrites the oldest message when the memory is full.

That is what my Nokia does. I've always prefered the interface on Nokia phones to SonyEricsson. I don't what it is - but the Nokia software interface is so easy to use - and they have managed to keep it pretty much consistent across the entire phone range.

The amount of memory on modern phones is pretty poor when you consider that most of them can send/recieve MMS, have polyphonic ringtones and take pictures - all of which takes up more memory than txt messages.

[(Anonymous)]

The amount of memory on modern phones is pretty poor when you consider that most of them can send/recieve MMS, have polyphonic ringtones and take pictures - all of which takes up more memory than txt messages.

That is indeed the truly infuriating thing. The engineers who wrote the software for these phones should be shot. It seems that they decided to split the phone's memory up into pools, one for each kind of storage, rather than have everything stored in one big heap; the fact that they made the text pool too small is a minor error compared to the monumental cockup of splitting the memory up at all - the One Big Heap approach isn't exactly fucking rocket science, having been the standard paradigm since the NINETEEN FUCKING FIFTIES AT LEAST, and having several (http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/html/malloc.html) free (ftp://ftp.cs.colorado.edu/pub/misc/malloc-implementations) implementations (http://www.ajk.tele.fi/libc/stdlib/malloc.3.html).

Reminds me of Civ2, where there can't be more than some particular number of units in the game at once, presumably because their records are stored in a fixed-size array. Grr. At least there the limit is high enough that i only ran into it once - i think it was 32 768.

-- Tom

[snowking.livejournal.com]

2 screens is not several.

And actually in normal usage an asterisk would be rather esoteric. They're normally used for footnotes, not emphasis. :P

But a write-over function would be nice.

[snowking.livejournal.com]

Your LJ ate my comment. *kicks it*

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

I got the email. You and your pesky definitions. But you do get points for the Foxtrot icon. :)

Blegh

[(Anonymous)]

So much wrong and still so much fiddling eh?