Sony Ericsson K750i > Reviews (418)

Ask anyone who knows me. I change the phones on my PAYG account (I have a contract and a PAYG account) frequently and I've always had a Nokia. There has been no other reason except that I like Nokias and I've got used to their interface over the past 8 years I've had a mobile phone. Anyway, my fiancée decided she was going to upgrade the phone on her contract to a K600i and thus the drivers on the PC would have to be updated as we connect the phones to the PC to sync them, or we could use bluetooth (now called BT and nothing to do with British Telecom) that was on the K600i. We opted for BT, but the problem for me was my Nokia didn't have BT so I decided to get a new phone.

After perusing the specs of the K700i and realising they were similar to Trace's K600 (which I hated myself for liking) I decided to defect to Sony Ericsson and try something new. I'd seen the phone advertised in various places for £75, but I was buggered if I could find one. Everywhere I looked, they were awaiting stock or had sold out, but I managed to get one for 99 portraits of the queen with Virgin (blech) so after walking out the shop I promptly unlocked the SIM restriction (VERY VERY VERY STUPID! DON'T TRY IT AT HOME KIDS AS IT INVALIDATES THE WARRANTY!) before playing with it. Now the general specs are...

Colour display (65,536 colours, 176 x 220 pixels)
Integrated VGA camera with video recorder (including sound)
Bluetooth™, infrared and cable (USB & RS232) connectivity
Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) - send pictures and sound like text messages
Downloadable 40-voice polyphonic & mono ringtones, plus ringtone editor (MusicDJ™)
Downloadable Java™ games
FM radio and MP3 player
WAP 2.0 (GPRS), email
High Speed Data (HSCSD - up to 28.8 kbps)
Speed dialling & voice dialling
Joystick, camera button, navigation key, menu shortcuts
Predictive text (T9)
Mobile chat
Voice memo / recorder
Speaker phone
Picture phone book
Wallpaper, screensaver and themes - all downloadable
Calculator, calendar, alarm, stopwatch
Sync ML
Memory: 41 Mbytes
Battery standby: 300 hours
Battery talktime: 8 hours
Vibration alert
Tri band

Sounded cool, huh? But was it?

Looks wise it's quite sexy. The fascia is a brushed aliminium look and not cluttered. For the customisers among us you can't get fascias for this. Well I tell a lie - you can get unofficial ones but they're a total pain to fit and I've never bothered with them. The keys are pretty small however so those who have large fingers or long fingernails may find this a bit of a problem.

The menu is pretty easy to understand, but it has some failings, especially when it comes to navigation. The phone has a joystick and this can be tempramental at times. It's quite sensitive sometimes and sometimes it requires a determined push. This may be a personal thing as I don't like phone joysticks, but it's horses for courses with this. You'll either like it or hate it but you do get used to it.

The display is crystal clear, quite large and very bright. Even on the sunniest of days you can see what you're doing without a problem.

One thing I do like about this phone is it has a little clock thats displayed on the background when the screen is powered down. If the phone is put in power save mode then this disappears, but in the other modes it's there. One slight snag is the battery does drain a bit quicker when this is activated, but it's no biggie as even thought this happens the battery has staying power (I can get away with 4 days between charges with moderate use).

The screen can display pictures or themes as standard and also has a screensaver which kicks in after a set period before it blacks out. These are much of a muchness and to be honest not something I've concentrated on. Mine came with 4 themes and about 30 pictures and animations for the screen saver.

The camera on the phone it's too great It's 0.3 megapixel which is slightly lower than a webcam and it does seem to have some slight clarity issues. It's OK if you want to point and click your mates for your contact entries or snap amusing moments, but you're not going to become a Lord Lichfield. The video camera part seems to be a bit better and does it's job. Something I do like the little light that you can activate in low light modes, although in a big open area it's not as good as a flash. I've used as a torch before now as well to find keys in the car when it's dark. One gripe I have is there is no lens cover on the camera (unlike the 600i and the 750i). It would have been nice, but it's not the end of the world.

Ringtones wise, it's got a decent selection. Most are polyphonic, but there are a few voice ones in there. One problem you may have though is if you can't upload them to the phone. They seem to have guessed that people like to either download or upload the ringtones and they've focused on this more from the looks of things. As I said they're decent, but they're not great. I'd recommend shelling out £15-20 for a bluetooth dongle to upload them to the phone (more on that later though) or finding someone with bluetooth on their phone to send you the files.

The phone does have a radio built in and this is quite a nice feature. The handsfree kit (supplied) doubles as an aerial and I must admit the volume from it on handsfree is OK and quite audible. You can turn it into a conventional radio by flicking it on to loudspeaker which is also decent volume wise. I've had Nokias where it's sucked the battery, but this one seems to be OK and doesn't kill the battery.

The MP3 player isn't too bad, but one failing is the phone doesn't have the expansion slot for a menory card. The memory is 41MB (which is actually quite large) but you're likely to get around 35 minutes of music on this at 128Kbps quality (maybe a little more, but you do need some free for pics and stuff), but it's not an IPod replacement by any means. If you can upload the MP3s then you can use them as ringtones as well. It's OK for a short drive to work or something, but not much more.

The contacts list is great. I use these to their max potential as a phone needs to be an address book as well.

This has entries for phone numbers, faxes, e-mail addresses, web addresses, house addresses and pretty much everything including an entrie for other information. You can set pictures for your contacts as well which flash up when they text or call as well as set a ringtone for them individually.

The organizer menu has a calendar, notes, to do list, alarms, stopwatches and a few other things. They all do exactly what they say on the tin. They're easy to use and I don't think I need to explain it.

OK, I mentioned bluetooth and for those that wonder what it is I'll explain. In a nutshell it's way of connecting to another BT enabled device like a PC or other BT phone without the need for wires or line of sight (infrared is line of sight) as it's all done with radio waves. Now this is great as you can use the headsets with no wires (also known as magic slugs to me and my mates) and other BT devices. The main use of this is to sync to your PC, but the SonyEricsson SybcManager that comes with the phone is dire. This isn't a problem with the phone but the actual software on the CD. The synching works great, but if you're going to use this with your PC then get Float's Mobile Agent which is available for free if you do a Google on it. I recommend this software whether you use BT, infrared (which the phone also supports) or a simple cable connection as it's far superior to the stuff that comes bundled with the phone.

On a serious note with the BT, if you intend on leaving it on make sure your phone has a decent name if you change it. I've seen one phone called cheeseyknob when I was toothing in a pub one night so make sure it's called something nice and not something silly. People who 'tooth' scanning for BT enabled devices can see what the phone is called, and I do recommend changing it from K700i which is the default name purely for security.

The games aren't too bad and you get 3. Darts (er darts), River Riders (a kind of Toobin variant) and Sega Tennis. Sega Tennis is easily the best and a kind of virtua tennis affair. You can upload your own java games, but make sure you drag the jar files to the root menu of the files directory and nowhere else as you can't seem to place them into the Games or Applications folders drectly. When you do this it knows what they are and it asks you where it should place them (Games or Applications).

One thing I haven't commented on is the WAP browser as I hate WAP, haven't used it and therefore cannot comment. Oh and it's probably worth noting that this phone is NOT 3G compatible.

This phone isn't perfect, but then again these days no phone is. It does have several failings, but none of these is serious enough for me to think bad of it. If you're using another phone at the moment then switching across may cause a bit of a system shock, but this phone does grow on you in a nice way. I would recommend this phone as it's a decent phone, has some nice features and the few shortcomings it has don't detract from it.