It works, more or less, but it's no Nokia! (Sony Ericsson K700i)

Member Name: Flup

Product:	Sony Ericsson K700i
Date:	25/10/04 (1848 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Pretty, Feature-packed, Big, bright screen

Disadvantages: Buggy firmware, Sluggish user interface, Poor build quality

After nearly a decade of Nokia use (my first phone was a brick-like 2140), due to supply shortages I could either have waited two months for a 6230 or plumped for the K700i. Eager to see what all the fuss was about, I went for the latter.

Pretty much from the word "go" I knew I'd made a mistake. The user interface is inconsistent, clunky and feels slow and unresponsive. The battery life was poor when compared to my previous phone, a Nokia 8310. And worst of all, it was buggy: apart from the niggles like silent mode not silencing everything and the ludicrous limitation of fifteen people in a contact group, it started to crash. Now "crash" and "reboot" just aren't words I want to associate with a telephone, but that it did, more and more frequently. Try to put an emoticon in the dictionary? Crash. Close a Bluetooth GPRS connection from a PDA? Crash. Every so often at random? Crash. The screen goes black, then white, and the thing remains unresponsive for a minute or so, despite a seemingly normal display.

Now don't get me wrong: Nokia are far from perfect, and I did crash my 8310 once or twice, but it really was once or twice. It took me about half an hour to start crashing the K700i, and if I can do it, then the testing team at Sony Ericsson can do it too. The fact is that too little testing was done, and beta-quality firmware is now in the hands of punters. I did eventually shell out for a DSS-25 cradle for it and upgraded the firmware from their website, solving some but not all of the problems (and not all mobile networks allow you to do this). But come on guys, this shouldn't be necessary. TEST YOUR PRODUCTS!

In all of this I haven't mentioned what the thing is actually for: making and receiving calls. This it does, and to be fair it's never crashed mid-call (lucky for it!). Its user interface deficiencies show up even in this simple operation, though: several times I've called a call centre, turned the volume up so I can hear them, then pressed "2" or whatever I've been told to do, only to find that I've turned the volume back down. It seems that when you change the volume, a bargraph appears showing you how loud it is, and this uses the number keys to directly specify a volume level. Apart from the fact that the thing is pressed to my ear and I can't see that the keypad mode has changed, I also can't see when the bargraph disappears again. Hopeless, hopeless design, betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of how people interact with and take cues from technology.

I'd like to say something positive about build quality, and first impressions lead one to believe that it's a solid little thing, but the back cover is very flimsy, the little logo below the keypad fell off after only a few weeks, and the charging port cover on the bottom is ill-fitting and rather pointless.

All in all, it seems that Sony Ericsson have gone for the angle of creating an impressive-looking, feature-packed product without actually doing the back-room work to make it pleasant to use. This is a real shame, because it should have been a fantastic little gadget, but to me it's just made me pine for my Nokia.

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