T100 - The Cell from Hell!. Review on Sony Ericsson T100

Last year, some nasty bugger stole my dear Panasonic. I went shopping for a new cell, and I was faced with the bewildering array of shiny brands. To cut a long shopping story short, I believe it was the devil himself who made me pick this crap cell out of the display case. Sleek, suave-looking but hiding beneath it a poorly designed, grossly inefficient battery, poor call reception, and a nightmare keypad.

All temptations come nattily dressed, and the Sony Ericsson T100 is no exception. But as many souls have found out, the cell is cheap because of its ridiculously low quality components and poorly researched ''features''.

Its keypad makes an annoying tic-tic sound when the keys are pressed. One can't sms in a hurry as the alphabet-navigation is terrible. Miss an alphabet, and you have to go the entire cycle of about 3 alphabets and 3-4 symbols to get to that alphabet again.

The Phone book is user-unfriendly. If you need to get a number off the book in a hurry, chances are you would be stumped. The name and number are displayed for about 2 secs alternately. Blink and you miss them, quite literally. The software is very buggy. The cell hangs a lot.

The messages take a whole 15 seconds to display. A most irritating ''please wait'' sign appears everytime you want to view a new message.

WAP services are almost un-usable because of very poor battery life. The tune composer is a joke - most notes aren't even represented. It kills even a decent composition. Worse, the tunes sound like a mouse squeaking and mostly cannot be heard in heavy traffic.

The sms notification is just limited to two small beeps or deafening silence - no choice of tunes for sms. The drawback here is if any other Sony Ericsson person is around, you just can't make out whether it was your cell that beeped or the other person's. Suffice to say, I hate the cell. It you are not convinced, read on.

Within one month of its purchase, its keys jammed up. This was my first trip to the service station and I was informed I had ''exposed'' my delicate darling cell to too much dust. It is laughable that Sony Ericsson - the collaboration of two electronics giants markets its cells in India without doing any ground research. India is a land of dust.

Delhi is the most polluted capital. Sony's basic cells do not even survive a month in the capital. Frankly, their credibility in the cellphone market takes a hit.

The next month, I had to make some international calls. I was very irritated to find that the cell ran out of battery life the second a 3 minute long international call ended. That meant I had to wait ~2.5 hours between two 3 minute calls to recharge the cell!

To make matters worse, the last half minute of each call was spent asking the person at the other end to repeat what he/she said as the cell has a very bad reception quality and would transmit a series of metallic sounds instead of voice.

This took me to the service station the second time. This time, the technicians told me that the problem was with my network - Dolphin. Now, Dolphin isn't too reliable when it comes to network up-time, so I accepted the explanation and came back home. But later, I found that the metallic-sound menace started occuring on every call- even local ones.

I then compared a Nokia cell with a dolphin card and my cell with the same type of card and found much to my disgust that my cell actually showed a faulty display of signal strength. In Connaught Place - the heart of the city where signal intensity is always maximum, my pretty cell displayed a pathetic 2/5 intensity. The call quality matched the display - poor and unacceptable. The ugly Nokia cell, on the other hand, had absolutely crystal clear reception.

I walked into the service center a third time armed with the Nokia cell and forced them to see the difference. But the technicians had a knave up their long sleeves. They blamed it on software and pointed to my warranty card which ruefully included only the hardware under the replacement assurance. I was crestfallen.

I don't have a tree which bears currency notes for me, neither do I ever win contests in which great cell-phones are given away for free. So I am still in cellphone hell - stuck with this stone-age cell an year later. All the problems persist

I just hope Sony Ericsson pulls its act together and stops cheating people with their flashy but low quality cells. As for me, I am NEVER going to buy another Sony Ericsson again. For that matter, I don't think I will enter a contest which has a Sony Ericsson phone as a give-away. I am sorry for the thief who manages to steal my cell this year - in advance; he will be getting the ultimate crappy cell of them all - Sony Ericsson T-100.

PS: I am somehow impelled to add this comment at 4.00 am in the morning. I hate this cell. Damn. Don?t ever ever go near this cheap and obnoxious cell EVER. I just messed up an international interview just because of its hopeless quality of reception. Lord. I feel like throwing it in a ditch. ...and I will. :/