A great phone with amazing camera (Sony Ericsson K800i)

Member Name: jord121290

Product:	Sony Ericsson K800i
Date:	26/02/07 (228 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great camera, MP3 playback, big screen, nice design

Disadvantages: Internal memory not really enough, some things could have done with more thought and better design

The K800i is a top of the range phone from Sony Ericsson, designed with particular emphasis on the camera features, as are all of the ‘K’ series phones from Sony, in comparison with the ‘W’ series, which has advanced music features instead.

I upgraded from an aging Nokia 7250i, which I had bought second hand off of eBay and was beginning to fail a bit. I liked the look and features of this phone after seeing one that a friend had, but I was very hesitant as all my previous phones had been made by Nokia, and I had also seen the Nokia N73 which had fairly similar features for nearly the same recommended price. However, I finally decided to go ahead and purchase the phone from Phones4U online, as they had a special offer on it allowing me to save about £40.

The phone is available on pay as you go from Vodafone or O2 (which I chose) or contract from most networks. If you decide that contract would be better for you then I recommend carefully considering O2, as they have the limited edition, silver ‘James Bond’ version of the phone exclusively for their contract customers.

One of the things that appealed to me greatly about the phone was its range of connectivity. It features Bluetooth, infra-red, a USB connection, WAP and a memory card slot for Sony’s new M2 Micro memory cards – specifically designed for phones.
All of these options for connectivity mean that there is practically always one way or another to move around your files, music, images etc, either to other phones or to your computer and other devices.

The design of the phone is very sleek, the standard black version has a large TFT screen on the front, along with nicely laid out buttons, including a thumb stick for menu navigation and two hotkeys above the screen, located next to the silver speaker grid.
On one side of the phone is the camera and volume buttons, again nicely laid out with a strip of silver running smoothly from the top to bottom, and the infra-red port. On the other side of the phone is the memory card slot and a button for use with the music player.
The top of the phone houses power button and the bottom has the cable port and hook for the supplied wrist strap to attach.
On the rear side of the phone you will find the main camera and flash, with a sliding cover to keep the lens clean and safe.

The phone is supplied with a wide range of accessories, including some fairly high quality earphones (with removable sponge covers for comfort) that can be used for hands free mode or listening to music. There is also a wrist strap for making sure you keep hold of the phone whilst on the move, though I find this gets in the way a lot and so choose not to use it.
A software CD is also supplied so that you can connect the phone to your PC or laptop and transfer files to and from it, or even use it for your internet connection, though this is likely to be very expensive unless you have a special deal with your network operator and so I wouldn’t recommend it.

The actual phone functions are very impressive. Naturally there are plenty of call options with the usual address book for storing numbers of friends, family, clients etc. You can also add things such as e-mail addresses and web addresses to entries in the address book, which is particularly useful if you intend to set up your phone so that you can send and receive e-mail on the move.
The usual call registering functions are also available, so that you can see how many calls you have made, received or missed and therefore calculate your credit balance.

Providing you have a 3G SIM card, you can also make video calls using the small VGA camera that is located on the front of the phone above the screen. I found video calls very easy to make with this phone and it includes a lot of image quality and sound options. I was a little disappointed that this is all the front camera can do, as it would sometimes be nice to take pictures using this camera as well, but that is only possible using the main camera on the back.

There a wide variety of messaging methods available for use, including the standard text messaging option with a range of realistic smileys and different text entry methods including progressive typing which will guess what you are entering, saving you quite a lot of time.
There are also e-mail functions, though I found this very hard to set up, and then requires access to the internet which can be costly depending on your contract or charge scheme.
Multimedia messaging is also available to send pictures to people, though if you are in range it is far easier to send pictures and sounds via Bluetooth, and of course it’s free to use Bluetooth, whereas MMS can be anything from 30-70p per message.
Also under the messages menu is an RSS Reader for viewing the latest news available on RSS channels. Unfortunately this also requires a connection to the internet via WAP.

The camera function is by far this phone’s best selling point. It has replaced my old digital camera as I actually find it has better image quality. There are plenty of options to fiddle around with to get your picture perfect, including scene settings to set up for pictures at night or in special lighting environments such as snowy landscapes or on the beach with the sun causing a lot of light reflection from the sand. The flash is very bright and more than adequate for most photographs. It has three settings – auto, red eye reduction and off. I would have liked to see a forced flash option as this can be helpful when the camera doesn’t seem to think it needs to flash but in reality really does, though this is a minor complaint really and we need to remember that this is a phone not a digital camera.
Image quality is very good, with a maximum of 3.2 megapixels, which is outstanding for a phone camera. If you find that you do not need that much detail then you can change the quality to 2MP or 1MP, or even to VGA mode which was the sort of quality that very early phone cameras achieved as a maximum.
The camera has a very good digital zoom, though a lot of quality is lost if you try zoom in any more than half the maximum amount, and at full zoom the image will look very pixelated.
There are also plenty of options once the photo has been taken, as you can touch it up using auto level and auto contrast functions, or add fun frames, effects such as cartoon, and text.
The camera also acts as a very high quality video camera, complete with sound recording. This is very similar to use as the camera functions.
It is important to note that due to the quality of the images and videos, if you intend to be doing a lot of image capture then you will probably find yourself needing to buy a new memory card for the phone, as the internal memory is quite small and already partially used up with applications and pre-loaded sounds and pictures.

There are plenty of entertainment functions on the phone. This includes some great Java games such as tennis or mini-golf (both in complete 3D) and there are plenty more that can be downloaded from various places for a small cost. The Sony Ericsson website has some particularly good games and is very reliable to purchase from, with no chance of being signed up to those annoying subscriptions which bombard you with costly text messages.
There is also a radio function, though this requires the headphone to be attached even if you want to play it over the loudspeaker as they act as the antennae.
Of course there is always the MP3 player if you prefer to upload some of your own music to the phone from your PC using the software supplied on the CD, though like with the images you will probably find yourself needing a large memory card if you want to put a lot of music onto the phone.

Lastly there are also a lot of other helpful ‘general’ applications on the phone, including calculator, countdown timer, alarm, calendar, stopwatch and a fun application called FaceWarp which basically stretches and squeezes your photos in allsorts of interesting directions to give any pictures of you or your friends some very interesting and amusing looks.

The phone is very easy to use with simple menu navigation using the thumbstick and various hotkeys located around the phone. It is also very personalisable with completely changeable themes, wallpapers, screensavers and ringtones.
Battery life is generally very good though it will depend on what exactly you use the phone for. I find that using the flash and MP3 player are the biggest drains on battery life.

In conclusion, the Sony Ericsson K800i is a great phone that will suit those looking for some of the more advanced features such as a good camera, lots of connectivity and music playback capability.
There are areas where improvements could have been made but in all this is a great product and certainly the best phone that I have owned.

Summary: A very advanced phone that will suit those with a need for a good camera and music playback.

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