new phone v. 2.0

I talked about getting a new Sony Ericsson Z520a back in January. Well, about a week after using it, the power button started acting up. If the phone was turned off, it would take about a minute after pressing the power button for the screen to light up. After it lights up, it displays the Sony Ericsson logo for 3-4 minutes before the phone is loaded up and working. In addition to that, my battery life was about 10 hours on standby, which is completely ridiculous (the promised standby time is something like 7 or 12 days). So I went online and tried to see if there was something I could do about the battery life, and I ended up finding a bunch of people complaining about the phone. I wasn't too worried about it since people who are happy with a product don't tend to feel the need to praise it as much as people who had bad experiences feel the need to complain. That is, until I kept reading and found that there is a known memory leak problem with the phone, which admittedly I haven't encountered. But there have apparently so many returns that Cingular has privately recalled the phone from their vendors. It no longer appears on their website either. I didn't want to deal with the possibility of more defects on my phone, so I called up Cingular and exchanged the Sony Ericsson for a Motorola V557, which I wanted to get originally but wasn't available at that time on the website I got it from (Cingular Premier, which processes orders with employee discounts).

After getting the V557, I really wished I could keep the Sony Ericsson. The V557 is longer and thicker, and I really hate Motorola's unfriendly user interface. My grandma has an old Motorola black and white flip phone, and I gotta say the user interface has not changed that much. Mostly I hate the fact that you have to program the speed dial when you create a new contact, and if you want to put a number on, say, speed dial 3 and it was already occupied, it would erase the old number if you replace the speed dial with the new number. At least I think this is what happened because I'm missing some numbers that I might have replaced. The text messaging and button assigning aren't as flexible either. Rocky is the only person I text message most of the time, and when you send a new message the Sony phone shows who you've sent texts to before, so you can choose from a smaller list rather than your whole contact list. I loved that feature! Also, if you wanted to reassign functions to the directional buttons, you can assign just about any little selection under any menu option you want, which makes turning Bluetooth on and off real easy. On the Motorola I currently have it assigned to the Bluetooth menu, but I still have to go into setup, and then turn it on or off. There is a shortcut list, so I may be able to assign the Bluetooth on/off selection to a shortcut, then choose the shortcut when I reassign a button. I haven't tried it yet because it's too much work, LOL. Overall the Sony Ericsson interface is just very fluid and easy to use. I hated giving it up. I mean, okay, the Motorola interface is better than my old Nokia phone, but in comparison with Sony Ericsson's, it's a piece of shit.

Although one saving grace about the Motorola, which I realized last night, is that it's the phone I've been wanting for a while. I was looking at my aunt's Motorola V330, which is only available for T-Mobile and is the phone I would've gotten if I were still with them. After owning the V557, I realized that the V330 is almost exactly the same. It's the same size, has camera & Bluetooth, same antenna, same button layout, and very similar interface. The biggest difference is the way the shell looks - the top side is all blue and rubbery whereas the V557 has a lot of silver and some black rubbery stuff (the bottom side is exactly the same except for color). That makes me feel better, but next time I change phones I hope there'd be a more stable Sony Ericsson.