Sony Ericsson K850i Cyber-shot

...I should point out that Sony have added a "fingerprint attraction" feature, so fingerprints just fly straight towards the phone and take up a semi permanent residence there. If vanity bothers you that much, be prepared to carry a cloth around with you to clean it!

About the title of this section - it is a bit of a brick. For me this isn't a bad thing, as I like to know when I'm holding the phone, or that it won't fall out ...
...wheel look quite funny). Sony have solved the problem by making the buttons quite small, but placing them a fair distance apart. Vertically they are spaced 0.5cm apart, and horizontally they are 1cm apart. It does slow texting down slightly, but I rarely make mistakes. In fact seeing as I never have to go back to correct the "mashing the keypad" effect of closely packed buttons, I probably get a text finished quicker.

Navigation ... more

Those of you who have read my Motorola V620 review will know how much I loved it, and how pained I am that it has gone. It was a sad day. Fortunately it was also a happy day because I have my new k850i sitting here in front of me, so all is well. I hope you enjoy this review as much as I enjoy the phone itself.

The Styling - or "How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Brick"

It's quite pretty. Actually it's very pretty. Fine I happen to think it's downright gorgeous. It comes in two versions:

• Blue stripe on the sides with silver surrounding it, or...
• Green stripe on the sides with black surrounding it.

There is also a light that surrounds the d-pad on both. I'm led to believe that you can only obtain the green one in the Carphone Warehouse: the one O2 supplied me was blue, and I had no option to choose.

It has a large 2.2 inch LCD screen, which displays truly excellent colours. The back of the phone conforms to Sony's other new camera phones in that the back of it looks just like a digital camera, and nothing like a phone - essentially if you stand there taking a photo, anyone looking at you will be fooled into thinking you're using a digital camera. I should point out that Sony have added a "fingerprint attraction" feature, so fingerprints just fly straight towards the phone and take up a semi permanent residence there. If vanity bothers you that much, be prepared to carry a cloth around with you to clean it!

About the title of this section - it is a bit of a brick. For me this isn't a bad thing, as I like to know when I'm holding the phone, or that it won't fall out of my pocket as I'm walking along. It's very thick to be honest, probably because of the camera, but in that respect it rewards those with larger hands because it's less fiddly. It has an impressive mass of 118g (I can't say "it weighs" because I'm a physicist and know better!) so you're probably going to know you have it on you. In my opinion, the brickness of it really doesn't detract from the overall feel of the phone, it's just an endearing quality.

Ease of Use - or "Those With Small Hands Shall Be Rewarded Greatly"

Actually, it's not as bad as you might think. If it pleaseth you to know, my middle finger is 12.5 cm long, so suffice it to say I have fairly large hands (though it does make rude gestures from behind the steering wheel look quite funny). Sony have solved the problem by making the buttons quite small, but placing them a fair distance apart. Vertically they are spaced 0.5cm apart, and horizontally they are 1cm apart. It does slow texting down slightly, but I rarely make mistakes. In fact seeing as I never have to go back to correct the "mashing the keypad" effect of closely packed buttons, I probably get a text finished quicker.

Navigation is achieved using a "D pad" which is set around the 2 and 5 buttons. You might think that this is annoying, that you'd end up hitting the numbers around it when accessing menus, but no, the edges are raised and because the numbers are so far away you never hit them by accident. There are two "rocker" buttons which house the call and hang up buttons, as well as clear and a menu shortcut button. I'm still not sure if these are a good idea - the two buttons on the outside of each rocker (call and hang up, respectively) are fine, the inner ones can be harder to hit accurately.

The phone is cooler than you might think, with 3 touch-screen buttons at the bottom of the screen (the rest of the screen is not touch sensitive). These take a little practice, but once you can use them you're fine. Other than that, there are buttons on the side for camera and audio controls, but I'll deal with those later.

The Media Player - or "Turn Down That Damn ... Classic FM?"

One of the reasons I love this phone is the media player and radio available on it. You can put mp3 files (legally acquired, I hope) and Sony's own .aac files on it and they sound really rather good either through the onboard speaker or through the headphones provided. The radio only works with the headphones as they work as an antenna, and while I'm impressed with the technology, the quality of the reception is often fairly poor. This might have something to do with the fact that I only use it on the train to London in the morning; perhaps the train does funky things to the radio waves.

The media player makes good use of the accelerometer on the phone (I'll explain that later too) so you can control the player in either portrait or landscape modes. You can control the volume using two subtle buttons on the side of the phone, which work even when the keypad is locked so you don't have to unlock it to turn down that surprisingly loud death metal track you forgot was on there. From within the media player you can also view all your photos and videos that you've taken, as well as the built in ones.

Sony make dedicated walkman phones that don't have a camera. Honestly, I don't see the point. This media player is all I could ever really need, and I get a decent camera with it too.

The Camera - or "Why You Have To Put On Make Up Whenever You Leave The House"

Is 5 megapixels. Yes, 5. No, not 0.5, but 5. That's what you used to (and still) get in proper dedicated digital cameras. My old Konika digital camera only has 4 of them! I'm going to split this section into parts for general information, and for amateur photographers like myself.

--- For everyone---

There are two camera buttons and a slider on the right side of the phone. One button turns the camera on and off, one takes the photo, and the slider switches modes between view, photo, and video. From pressing the small camera button on the side to being able to take a photo takes about 5 seconds, which really isn't that bad. There are automatic settings galore which you can play with, from auto to night via landscape and portrait and others in between.

The camera is not as harsh as that in the N95 (or so I've read). Where the N95 artificially makes colours more vivid, the k850i gives more natural looking pictures which you can adjust later if you wish. I believe the camera can replace the compact digital camera in most situations - going out to dinner, going clubbing, a friend's birthday etc where you just want snapshots. If you want to take artistic and properly decent photos you'll already have a DSLR and will be reading the next section! It even has a feature that takes 9 photos in the space of a couple of seconds, and then selects the best one if you're not too confident when taking photos. I've never used this feature myself, it's just a little too annoying for my taste. There is a flash, which will quite effectively blind anyone who looks directly at it - I've turned it off.

The video mode is actually quite impressive. I took a short video clip of a choir rehearsal (don't laugh) and I was amazed by the quality of both the sound (of the phone...) and the video itself. I could make out lots of detail, and since it takes 30 frames per second for a video there's is no skipping or jumpy looking images. One more thing, unlike certain other previous Cybershot cameras, you do not activate the camera by lowering the shutter. The shutter is protected behind glass and opens only when you push the button on the side (or from within the menu), so there's less chance of it going off (or breaking) in your pocket.

---The Enthusiasts Section - or "Thou May Skippeth If It Doth Bore"---

In this section I'm going to assume you know a little bit about cameras. If you don't, then you don't really need to know any of this and feel free to skip this little bit, I'll let you know when to stop scrolling!The main settings you can adjust are:

• Pre programmed modes
• ISO
• Resolution
• Metering
• White Balance

Ok here's a little detail. The preprogrammed modes are:

• Auto
• Twilight Landscape
• Twighlight Portrait
• Landscape
• Portrait
• Beach/Snow
• Sports
• Document

The White Balance settings are:

• Auto
• Daylight
• Cloudy
• Fluorescent
• Incandescent

You can have ISO100, ISO200 or ISO400. The camera is also capable of spot metering. You can adjust the resolution from 5MP to 3MP, 1MP or VGA for picture messages. There is some shutter lag, perhaps a second or two though you can learn to compensate for it. I'm going to include some photos taken by the camera at the end.********Stop Scrolling Now!********

The Battery Life - or "I Have To Charge It How Often?!"

I don't know why I'm coming up with "funny" titles that make the phone sound bad, the battery life is actually rather good. I'm still in the phase of letting it die completely before I charge it (which I recommend everyone do with any battery powered device) and it lasts a good couple of days. Certain things will of course drain it much faster, for example the camera, bluetooth, media player or light (yes, it is also a torch). If you're sensible with it, it barely drains at all - I once wanted it to die quickly so left it on over night, expecting it to be dead when i awoke. It had infact lost only 3% charge over the course of about 10 hours (the next day was a Sunday, do forgive me!). The screen quickly turns off when not in use to conserve power. It charges up over night, I believe it only takes a few hours though.

Durability - or "Can I Hit It Repeatedly With A Hammer?"

Honestly, I don't know. By that I mean I don't know how durable it is, not whether you should hit it with a hammer. I accept no responsibilty for your phone if you do hit it with a hammer, though if you do please send me some photos, it would make good art! Unlike with my old Motorola which withstood everything, I'm not sure I can drop this on the floor and expect it to work perfectly when I pick it up. Being so expensive and pretty I get the impression it'd just shatter into a million pieces (pretty pieces, mind). I'd recommend you do your best not to drop it, throw it, crush it, sit on it, or submerge it in a viscous liquid.

The Accelerometer - or "What You Talking About, Fool?"

You're curious aren't you? It sounds like something you might find in the cockpit of the new Eurofighter, doesn't it? I suppose it is, actually. What the accelerometer does is detect subtle changes in the orientation of your phone. So if you're holding it normally with the screen above the buttons, it will know about it. This means that if you hold it like a camera (or view photos in landscape mode) it will automatically switch the image so that it looks the same. I find it exceptionally useful for looking at landscape photos at a larger size. There's even a built in game to show it off to its full extent, called marble madness. There's a marble in a kind of maze, and you move the ball around by moving the phone. If you lower the right side of the phone, the ball rolls "downhill" to the right, and so on. It's a very cool feature to show your friends, who will all inevitably want to play with it. The game itself really isn't that good as a game though, but hey, it's a bit of fun and shows how advanced the phone really is.

Funky Features - or "Other Cool Things I Don't Want To Waffle About"

• Torch - you can set a fairly powerful light on the phone to on, on for a minute, or SOS.
• You can download internet applications - I have google maps on my phone!
• Have a play for yourself and find out!

My Contract - or "You're being ripped off, mate"

I have my phone through O2, and it's not a bad tarriff. I pay £25 per month for 400 minutes, 1000 texts and 1MB of data per month, as well as unlimited calls to O2 mobiles (2000 minutes actually, because of the fair usage policy) and the phone was free. It arrived within a couple of days, but to transfer the number across from my old phone required a phone call to O2 customer services. You get a better deal if you go for a longer contract, for example my contract is 2 years, and would cost £5 a month more if it were an 18 month contract.

I'm going to end there, I hope you've found this review fun and informative.

Thanks for reading

Michael

**I've included 4 photos to show off the camera, the black and white one was modified in phone.**

http://www.sonyericsson.com/spg.jsp?cc=global&lc=en&ver=4001&te mplate=pp1_1_1&zone=pp&lm=pp1&pid=10868

UPDATE 04/11/07

Well in the days since writing this review I've had a problem come up with the phone (which I managed to resolve quite easily) but I should probably warn you of it. Essentially I believe the problem is caused by the phone being so new, as I've seen complaints of the same problem all over web forums. The phone switched itself off and on again, then whenever I tried accessing my messages (inbox/outbox/drafts/saved messages/sent messages) it would give me an "operation failed" error message. I couldn't receive or send texts either. I resolved the problem by performing a "master reset" of the phone which resets everything to factory settings. If you do it yourself, make sure you save your contacts list somewhere safe just in case. I've also lost most of my built in ringtones and themes. Oh well, the phone works again, and I'll go to the O2 shop and ask for all that stuff back.

I put this problem down entirely down to software being first generation, and it'll probably be resolved with the first firmware update comes out. I'm going to leave the rating at 5* because the phone really is exceptional, I think for a while it'll just be a love hate relationship. 

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