K700i - Oldie but Goldie (Sony Ericsson K700i)

Member Name: SWSt

Product:	Sony Ericsson K700i
Date:	03/01/06 (735 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Lots of features, small & lightweight, clear display

Disadvantages: battery life, not a great camera, questionable build quality

Let’s get one thing straight from the start: if you are looking for the latest mobile phone, packed with the most up-to-date technology to show off to your friends, then the Sony Ericsson K700i is not the phone for you. In mobile terms, it’s now reaching middle age, having first been released in mid-2004. However, if you’re looking for a phone that offers good reliability with some useful additional features, then it could well be a good option.

I’ll start off by considering some of the basics, before looking at some of the additional features in a bit more detail.

Specification:
-- 65k colour TFT screen
-- VGA Stills & video camera with up to 4x zoom
-- Bluetooth & Wap compatible
-- FM Radio
-- 41Mb memory
-- Calendar, notes, stopwatch, timer and alarm features
-- Sound recorder
-- MusicDJ & Sound recorder
-- Voice activated features

Size
Although not a clamshell design, the K700i is still small enough to fit in a shirt pocket without being too heavy or causing any unsightly bulges. It measures just under 95mm tall, less than 45mm wide, about 20mm deep and weighs about 100g. The phone is split roughly in half between the keypad and a reasonable sized and clear colour screen (measuring about 1½ inches tall by about 1¼ inches wide), which makes it pretty easy to use all the phone’s functions.

Usability
There’s a small “joystick” at the top of the keypad, which is used to navigate around options. Once you get used to this, it's easy to move around, However, initially you might have some problems as it can be a little over-sensitive and you can find yourself whizzing past the option you wanted. Keys are used consistently to navigate around menus and to select options, and it is always clear which key should be pressed to select a particular option, making the phone very easy to just pick up and start using. The only real criticism is that the keys themselves are a little small, so if you’ve got big fingers, you might find yourself hitting the wrong keys quite often.

Calling
Call quality and reception is excellent. The address book and a list of recent calls are easily accessible from the main screen, making quick calls straightforward and it’s easy to see who’s calling you thanks to the clear display screen. There’s a register of made/received and missed calls. The only problem here is it lists by name of caller, not chronologically. So, if you miss a call from the same person twice, only one of the missed calls is logged in the register under their name. The other downside is the ringtones are a little on the quiet side – even with the volume turned up to maximum, it’s difficult to hear the phone ringing in a noisy environment.

Camera/Video camera
The camera is fairly unremarkable – it’s only VGA, so is a bit under-powered compared with the megapixel camera phones now available. The pictures are reasonable, but the limitations are clear. You sometimes have to be patient when taking photographs – too much movement causes blurring and it’s not great at distinguishing between different shades of the same colour. However, if, like me, you just want it to take the odd fun snap when you’re out with your mates, you’ll find it OK.

It’s possible to switch between different size pictures, zoom in either x2 or x4 times and use the night mode to take photos in darker environments. In truth, though, the camera still doesn’t work that well in the dark. It’s also possible to add some effects to your photos/videos, including making them black and white or sepia toned.

One really annoying feature of the camera is that whenever you take a picture, it makes a noisy sound like the shutter on a manual camera. Whilst I understand the privacy issues why they've done this, it's incredibly annoying and makes it difficult to take a picture in a quiet environment (such as you child's school play). It used to be possible to do a firmware upgrade to get rid of this noise, but that's no longer possible on later releases of the K700i.

Memory
On the plus side, the phone has a massive 41Mb of memory, which gives you plenty of space for storing photos, videos, ringtones and games etc. To give you some idea, I’ve got around 50 games on my phone, several photos, a few videos of about 5 minutes each and several full songs as ringtones and I’ve still used less than a quarter of the available memory. There aren’t many phones at this price which give you such a large memory.

Pre-installed ringtones and games
The pre-installed stuff on this phone is pretty disappointing. The ringtones comprise of a couple of dull tunes and some beeps and bleep. You’ll want to download your own ringtones pretty quick or record your own using the surprisingly powerful sound recorder and DJ mixer! The games are boring (darts, for example), so you’ll need to download more.

Bluetooth
Downloading things is pretty straightforward. Save them to your PC, then transfer them to the phone via Windows Explorer using Bluetooth. Initially, I had a few problems getting the phone and PC to talk to each other, but this was due to Bluetooth problems with my PC. Similarly, it loses the connection quite often – but again, I think the PC is to blame.

FM Radio
The thing which really sold this phone to me was the built in FM radio. The downside is that you need to use the earpiece provided (as this acts as the aerial), so you need to carry it round with you. The radio is limited in what stations it can receive and the autoscan feature is useless (it fails to find a single station, but if you then do a manual scan, you can get several!) However, reception is really good and saves you the hassle of carrying round a separate phone and radio.

Battery Life
Battery life on this phone is disappointing. I mainly use it as a phone and for the radio. Even so, it needs recharging every few days. As soon as you start using any of the other features (games, camera etc.), the power is really drained and if you’re a heavy user of these, you’re realistically looking at charging it up every night.

Resilience
This one seems fairly resilient in that it’s been dropped lots of times and is still working. On the other hand, some (non-crucial) have fallen off – like the Sony branding from the front, whilst others are a bit loose (both the battery compartment and the clip covering the charger connection points are suffering from this). Since I’ve only had the phone for about 9 months, I do have some concerns over the quality of the build long term.

Overall
As I said at the start, if you’re looking for a good phone with reasonable amount of features, then I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this phone. Best of all, because it’s now quite old, it’s also reasonably cheap to buy (Argos were selling it on pre-pay for about £75 a few months ago)

Summary: A good mobile that will appeal to people who want a phone first, gadgets second

Processing/Quality:
Reliability:
Ease of use:
Sound quality:
Variety of features: