Just started using my new Sony A350 and noticed that in some situations(don't know exactly what) my shutter release button fails to operate?

The newer Alphas address this issue much more aggressively. The A100 will accurately auto focus and lock well outdoors generally speaking (depending greatly on the amount of available light) where it performs its overall best. Indoors, I am sad to report that it is unreliable here, and the AF speed slows considerably.

Your best bet is to use the A100 in DMF or MF mode indoors when not using a flash so that you can manually fine tune focus. To aid matters, you can use the pull up flash to fire a light pulse on your subject indoors helping it to lock and generally speaking this works well, yet you will have to put the flash back down after it locks if you want to use ambient light for your overall exposure (a setting allowing the A100 to use or not use the flash after AF assist would have been useful in my opinion). Indoors the A100 is all over the map, typically deciding on a much warmer than natural tone when not using the on board flash or a flash gun.

Even using the white balance presets isn't very reliable at all. This is a common problem with most digital cameras so it is par for the course on the A100. I often wonder what lights the engineers are using when setting up the firmware on cameras in general, the settings seem a mile apart from real life use.

In defense of the engineers however, there are many conditions that affect the kelvin reading of a particular type of lamp indoors (reflection of color off of painted walls, lamp shades, and how cool/warm fluorescent and incandescent lamps are rated at etc... ). This I believe is why indoor Auto White Balance is so troublesome to engineers, and that there seems to no real solution to the issue on the A100 as well. Best to adjust your kelvin and G/M (green/magenta) filters to your taste manually for White Balance if you want to use ambient light prior to shooting a particular session.

This advice is good for all cameras, not just the A100. You will find that the short amount of time spent doing this will pay dividends and save much time post processing and headache when viewing images. Indoors, I just adjust manually, or just adjust color in raw processing.

Dial design and button placement are very good, with the AEL and EV button placement being perfect. The 4 buttons on the left side of the back of the camera are large enough to find and use without hassle (even with gloves on). The finger groove indents aid in the use of them, and I was very sad to see them go in the A200 design.

The multi controller pad on the back has a decent enough resistance with a subtle but assuring click when you press down on it.