This phone is a few years old now, but they pop up on Ebay second hand very frequently for good prices. The screen is black and white and a nice size, although the bigger screen from the previous model J5 / J6 would have been nicer. All menus are accessed via the scroll wheel at the side. This is like the scroll on a wheel mouse and is a very good way of getting through the options for most things. Certainly better than a four way cursor pad.
I’d recommend anyone with a PC gets a data cable to use with the phone. Ringtones and wallpapers can only be sent to the phone using the cable connection and not via SMS. Musical ringtones are polyphonic and have a pleasant sound. The built in ones are reasonable but you can store ten or so of your own in addition. I found the Super Mario theme and have that as a ringer.
Also... you can sample sounds and use them as ringers or alert tones (e.g. SMS receipt). There appears to be no way to convert a sound to the phone’s sound format though, you have to record your sound into the phone’s microphone. I have a Star Trek sound effects CD and sampled a few of those which work really well. There is some official Sony software and some ’third party’ software which is a lot more useful, floating around on the internet.
The battery is long lasting enough to be practical between charges, sound quality on calls is fine and sending SMS is helped by the scroll wheel to select punctuation. This phone has T9 predictive text which I hate, but others find useful. Like a few Japanese devices, this one is timeless. It doesn’t look dated in comparison to modern phones. It looks like a phone and not a toy!
Maybe this is why the included ’games’ are so poor. I wouldn’t waste time on these! However there is a calendar which can remind you of appointments, birthdays etc. It’s functional and very useable. I hope to keep mine for a few years, build quality appears good.