Apart from the initial wow factor of having my Mac OS X Address Book more or less instantly synchronized with my new Sony Ericsson T608 via Bluetooth, I’m not entirely sure I’m completely pleased with this new purchase.

There’s the shortcomings of Apple’s iSync, of course, such as a lack of a report detailing what happens — what changed and what didn’t — each time I perform a sync. The process is slow, too, and to avoid having to manually update the changed contacts on the phone, I pretty much have to do a complete synchronization, wherein every contact is reviewed by iSync; it’s a slow process.But mostly, I’m disappointed in the T608’s poor user interface. As this review suggests, it’s less responsive than your average mobile phone — ‘pokey’ is an accurate description. There are brief delays between the pressing of a button and the interface’s reaction.

The phone᾿s contact manager, too, is a bust. Though it allows me to quickly skip to, say, all contacts that begin with an ‘S,’ I’m forced to manually scroll through all of them to find a name like, say, “Szekely.” With about 400 names in my list, this is a real pain. What’s more, there is, for some odd reason, a separation between the management of contacts and the management of speed dial numbers — to change a contact’s speed dial from, say, 20 to 21, you don’t go to that person’s listing in the contact manager at all, but rather to a listing of all the speed dial numbers.

When it comes down to it, though, Bluetooth synchronization is such a big plus, it’s hard to say that any of these shortcomings are deal-breakers. Or, I should say, I’m willing to put up with quite a bit in order to get Bluetooth.