Sound Quality

Incoming calls have great tonal qualities. Voices were clear and crisp. However, while listening in quiet environments, noise was noticeable. It's not so noticeable in noisy environments, however this background noise seems to happens quite often to GSM phones. A repetitive hissing sound will be heard in the background caused by vibration within the earpiece of the phone. It should be noted that when I tested the T68i using a Bluetooth headset the hissing was nonexistent, Tests show tonal balance was a little thin. It becomes more noticeable during higher volumes. But overall it's decent.

Outgoing calls calls were also very clear and crisp. When talking in noisy environments, the voice comes through pretty clearly. Background noise is filtered out pretty well, leaving you to talk without having to shout.

The earpiece volume was very good. It's sufficiently loud even in noisy environments while talking to soft spoken callers.

RF Performance

The T68i performed above average for the fact that it doesn't have a protruding antenna. However, it by no means has excellent reception. When conducting our tests we found several flaws.

The phone's ability to hold on to weak signals is above average when information is being sent. However, calls are dropped quite easily when idling. When receiving weak signals, there were frequent error bits sent that were not corrected. It's not to say that there's a lot, just more than we'd like to see. The result are occasional sound irregularities, garbled speech, drop outs, and loud bursts.

Overall we give the T68i a reception rating of:

As we stated above, it has excellent incoming and outgoing sound quality. If we would have stopped here, the T68i would be Above Average easily. However, problems with RF performance, holding and making calls with low signal strength, and bit errors, lower our rating for the T68i.

Pros

· Excellent color screen and contrast. Best we've seen thus far. 256 colors, 101 x 80 px screen.

· Good screen clarity and size. Great for text messaging fiends.

· Easily navigate through your menu's with the joystick. Once you use it you'll never go back.

· More aesthetically pleasing that the T68m. Great design and small size.

· Long battery life. Talk for hours. Go days without recharging.

· Large memory size. Store 510 phone entries and lots of pictures, ring tones, and other multimedia.

· MMS. Send pictures, animations, and sounds with your text messages.

· T9 Predictive Text. Type faster with predictive text. It completes words for you as you're typing them.

· Incredible set of software applications. Ericsson has outdone itself yet again. Everything this phone could possibly have is packed in here. Voice control, calendar, stop watch, composer, etc.

· Great versatility and customizability. Backgrounds, ring tones, screen savers, and themes. Is there nothing this phone can't change? Oh yeah, faceplates. (Unless it's 3rd party)

· Connect from anywhere with any means necessary. Bluetooth, IrDA, GPRS, Triband, WAP, etc. The list is endless.

Cons

· Poor to Average RF performance. Good voice clarity and quality, but unable to maintain or get a small signal.

· Lack of message summary information. When you get a lot of messages you can't tell them apart without opening each one.

· Arguably worse games than the T68m. Tetris is gone...

· Tiny buttons makes it hard for people with big fingers to press. You may suffer from button smashing syndrome.

Conclusion

As you can see there are a lot more Pros than Cons. However, the RF problems is significant. If you can't get a stable connection what good is a phone? If you can live with it or get good reception we'd recommend it. We give the T68i an overall rating of:

We would have given it an Excellent rating if RF performance was better. We feel that the flaw is significant enough to lower our rating.

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