Finally got an upgrade from Vodafone, and opted for the C902 Cybershot camera phone. The camera is, as I expected, a joy to use and produces some very nice images. Here’s a shot taken on my recent holiday to the Lake District in Cumbria. Good eh?
Unfortunately, I have also had problems with this handset. Within two weeks of getting it, it died. Switching it on just resulted in the camera button lighting up, but the phone itself refused to start at all. Returned it to Vodafone, and they reinstalled the firmware. This seemed to fix the issue, but then today it did exactly the same thing again. Not wanting to send it off for repair yet again, I tried overwriting the firmware using the Sony Ericsson Update Service (SEUS). It seemed to work, akthough I am still stuck with the rather awful Vodafone branded firmware that they insist on installing on it. I have asked Vodfone directly if they would be willing to put the Ericsson firmware on it (I’d be happy to pay a reasonable amount) but they say they simply won’t do that. Bad show I say – I’ve been a Vodafone customer for almost a decade now and really do think this is pretty tight fisted of them. I’m sure the phone would be more stable with Ericsson firmware, and would REALLY like to be able to delete some of the awful stuff they’ve installed on it such as the bad collection of games. They’re all demos installed just to attempt to get me to make a purchase. Every other phone I’ve ever had, right back to my Nokia 3310, came with at least one full game installed. The fact they’ve allocated two shortcuts that I can’t edit to Vodafone Live is a bit of a niggle as well. They’ve also instisted on hard coding the homepage of the web browser as their own website. that totally sucks – even Microsoft haven’t got the sheer cheek to hardwire the homepage of their web browser.
Overall, a great phone, with awful firmware if you’re on Vodafone.
