So I've now spent a week using an O2 Cocoon as a primary phone for all my personal stuff. In fact this was a test of several things: the handset itself, a clamshell (which I've never used in real life before), O2 as a network, and being a PAYG customer (which I noticed made me *way* more price sensitive and less inclined to use 118 or mobile data in general).

I've been gently impressed by the phone in many ways (it grew on me to a disturbing extent over the first few days of use), and I reckon it's the best operator-branded handset I've yet seen, but there's a few things about it which were frankly awful and had me pining for my trusty Sony Ericsson K800i:

1. Despite the manual saying it does, I've not managed to get the device to sync with my mac, or even appear visible to it;
2. I couldn't tell whether the charging cradle ("The Nest") worked or not. Certainly the phone charged when I plugged the cable directly into it, but via the cradle things were less clear;
3. A biggie: I couldn't get photos off it by Bluetooth. For some reason the handset fell over when I tried to pair it with my laptop or send photos from it, leaving me with a load of pics I just cant get off;
4. The phone sped up when I removed the animated wallpaper from the home screen; up until that point it was annoyingly slow;
5. I couldn't work out how to reply to an MMS with a text message, which was *really* annoying;

These aside, it's quite a decent device though; and whilst it's not for me I could see it taking serious market share away from the RAZR and chums or LG. Not everyone I showed it to liked the aesthetic, but I suspect it's a love-it-or-hate-it look, and I fell on the side of loving. As version 1, I think it's really interesting, but wouldn't buy it or use it myself. Version 2 I expect to be more tempting tho. Things I particularly liked about it:

1. Having the first few words of a text message appear on the outer casing when it arrives; great for glancing at, though I can see how this might lead to problems depending on the content of the incoming message ;)
2. The use of colour in the UI; nothing fancy, but it was clear and felt very coherent as an O2 device;
3. It makes such a good alarm clock - to the point that, when the device is nestled in its cradle, it almost looks like a cheap and rather tacky digital clock. I don't think this is a bad thing, personally - it's recognising a behaviour that might belittle the lofty aspirations some operators have for their devices, but is nevertheless important to real people;

So there you go. I've been sent some other documentation on the background to the design of the device by the guys at O2s agency; but I don't want to get into the habit of posting anything they send me up here unless folks specifically want to see it. Drop a comment if you do.

Comments

[Steve]

I just got the cocoon and feel similarly. The functionality is huge and seems to do everything well. I managed to get it hooked up to my Windows PC without any trouble at all.

[Sarah]

I think it looks like a really smart alarm clock, i've always used my phone as my alarm clock but this just works much better... i can look over when it wakes me up with the radio and in my sleepy haze, tell if i can snooze or have to get up.
I wish there was a snooze button on top so i don't have to take it out of the cradle.

do you know if its possible to play the radio without speakers when its not in the cradle?

o2 have set up a blog for the cocoon: check it out here http://www.o2cocoonblog.co.uk

SJ

[Amelia]

Hi Tom - Thank you for the posts.

I am part of the team at O2's agency, working on Cocoon. Just wanted to check in with how the issues with connecting up with the Mac? Hope that they worked out, we have put your issues to the engineers at O2 so will be following up on that this week.

Thanks again for doing this pre-release blogger program. And any other thoughts either add them to the O2 blog or just drop me an email!

A

[Shaha Alam]

I've only used it for a couple of days so my impressions are somewhat premature. having said that:

I like the look of the phone. the external display is gimmicky but cool nonetheless.
The sound is wayyy to low for my tastes. even on maximum volume its still pretty quiet.
I wish there was a button on the outside to activate the external display. this would be great to check the time!
The alarm clock would have been better if you could set it to activate only on weekdays. I'm a long time user of windows smartphones and not having this feature as standard is a little frustrating.