Sony Ericsson is going through a bit of a transition at the moment, as it shelves its popular Cyber-shot and Walkman ranges in favour of the new Entertainment Unlimited range of handsets, including the Aino and the Satio. As a result, the T-series is somewhat overshadowed, which is a shame because the lower-end range is a nice addition to the Sony Ericsson stable. Buy the latest T-series handset, the Sony Ericsson T715, with 3 and you will also get live Twitter feeds direct to your phone.

Style and handling for the Sony Ericsson T715

The Sony Ericsson T715 is a compact slider, similar to the Walkman range of phones. Despite being pleasingly light, the T715’s sliding keyboard is spacious with raised buttons. The display is pretty small, at just 2.2 inches, which makes viewing content difficult. But it’s not a touch-screen so won’t be needing to navigate menus or trying to negotiate an on-screen QWERTY keyboard.

Under the screen sit two hard keys, a D-Pad, a running apps button and a cancel key. But to confuse matters, the right-hand hard key seems to alternate between being a back key and a cancel key, with no apparent pattern. This meant that trying to delete a letter in text sometimes led to closing down the application completely. We suggest using the dedicated cancel key for deleting text just to be safe. The running applications tab is a useful tool; there are plenty of apps in this little handset, some of which can be run simultaneously.

Social networking on the Sony Ericsson T715

Social networking is the Sony Ericsson T715’s forte, with Twitter firmly at the front. Buy the phone through 3 and you get the full-on experience. There are a variety of ways to  access Twitter on your phone including setting it as a favourite. To get the most from it, register using the applications menu and you will be able to get live alerts from your friends, dipaly your location and find other Tweeters near you. There’s no GPS connection on the T715, though, so this is done by estimating where you are using triangulation – the same is true for finding your location on Google Maps, which is built in here.

You also get live feeds for Facebook. The platform is nicely split into categories like wall, inbox and friends list, similar to the PC view. You can run Facebook and Twitter at the same time, but because of the small display on the T715, you will only get live feeds from the app you used last.

A nice touch is the ability to send photos taken on the phone’s 3.2-megapixel camera directly to either Twitter or Facebook. The quality of the pictures isn’t good for printing, but is entirely adequate for keeping your online friends up to date with your life.

The verdict on the Sony Ericsson T715

The Sony Ericsson T715 is a good-value social networking phone that it sure to be a hit with younger users. Added to the good social networking functions are Windows Live Messenger and Skype, and despite the small screen size, the handset is a nice, basic model that should keep social networkers happy.

You can buy the Sony Ericsson T715 By Clicking Here