Sony Ericsson Txt

After the impressive-if short-lived-rise to popularity of the BlackBerry Curve 8520, several of RIM's competitors have launched their own lookalikes with varying degrees of success.  The Sony Ericsson Txt is a great example.

Plastic fantastic

If you're looking for a cheap phone, then you can't expect it to be well-made.  Although affordable handsets sometimes surprise us by breaking this rule, Sony Ericsson has followed it to the letter in this case.  The Txt is made of a rather dubious lightweight plastic and is far too flimsy to be robust.  It's badly put together with loose components almost everywhere.

The good news is that it's easy to get the hang of.  As well as the keyboard, there are plenty of buttons that provide easy access to the main functions, even if we're a long way from a great example of ergonomic design.

Keyboards are ...

... great for writing long mails.  A normal desktop keyboard has over a hundred keys, but the smaller keypad on a phone still needs to cover a whole range of letters, numbers and punctuation.  It's really not somewhere to cut corners, especially when it's the main selling point of a particular handset.

And yet the keyboard is one area where Sony Ericsson really seems to struggle.  Despite being billed as perfect for SMS, the Txt keyboard really doesn't live up to the hype: the keys are too stiff but are made from a softer plastic with a texture that doesn't help you tell them apart with your fingertips and don't give enough feedback when you press them.  It's light years away from the keyboard on the Curve 8520, which still didn't break the bank.

No change with multimedia

There are no surprises in the multimedia department, but then again with such a small display and the rather limited capabilities of the proprietary OS, we weren't expecting much either.  It didn't take long to run into problems.  The audio player is one of the most basic we've ever seen, without any extra features.   You're going to have to be very determined if you plan on using it for watching a video ....

There is a web browser, but it seems to be a box-ticking exercise on Sony Ericsson's part rather than anything else: the screen is so small that actually going online is a real pain.  The Txt really isn't cut out for intensive mobile Internet usage-especially as it has WiFi but no 3G.

The one area where the Txt does succeed is battery life.  As is often the case with less ambitious handsets running software developed in-house, the Txt lasts much longer than rival smartphones and can easily last a whole day.  But then again, you can't do that much with it, so it's hardly a huge surprise ...

As you might have gathered by now, the conclusion is simple: if you're looking for an SMS powerhouse, get yourself a BlackBerry Curve, not the Sony Ericsson Txt.