Sony Ericsson K850i Cyber-shot > Reviews (110)

The Sony Ericsson k850i was marketed primarily as a camera phone; its 5MP flash camera was a major selling point and the main focus of its televised advertisement campaign. At over a centimetre in depth, this phone is a chunky little machine, but still a very aesthetically pleasing one and, overall, I found that it was able to suit my needs very well.

Before I bought the phone, I heard some complaints that the 3 touch-sensitive buttons were unresponsive, or became so after a few months of use. Having used this phone for almost a year now, I find mine to be just as responsive as they were when I first took the phone out of the box; not overly temperamental, but sensitive enough to prevent me from having to tap at them. I was able to use them with ease and felt that they were a very nice touch, if perhaps slightly redundant; I got the feeling that they were only there for the novelty factor, rather than any real practical reasons.

The keypad of this phone is attractively backlit (blue light if you get the blue model and green if you get the green one) when unlocked and in use. The keys are very small, but well spaced out which is excellent if you have large fingers. Unusually, the keys used to navigate the menu of the phone (up, down, left, right) are in between some of the number keys, forming a sort of box around the keys 2 and 5. This, conversely, may make the phone difficult to use for those with large fingers, as I'd imagine that it would be quite easy to press one of the adjacent buttons by accident. However, for me the keypad was excellent; very responsive without requiring too much pressure, but not too sensitive either. In addition to the navigation and number keys, there are 4 silver buttons above them; the 3 standard buttons to call, hang up and cancel, as well as an extra button to bring up phone shortcuts.

The menu of this phone is almost identical to that of most other Sony Ericsson models, and as a previous Ericsson owner it took very little getting used to. The menu is called up using one of the 3 touch-sensitive buttons and navigated using the previously mentioned navigation "box". The menu has 12 options: PlayNow, Internet, Entertainment, Cyber-shot, Messaging, Media, Alarms, Contacts, Radio, Calls, Organizer and Settings. I must confess that I have not fully utilised all of the applications that came with the phone. PlayNow is apparently a music service, although I have never used it - similarly, due to extortionate fees pedalled by O2 I haven't used the internet so cannot comment upon the browsing experience offered by this phone. Entertainment offers the rudimentary cheap photo, music and video editing software, as well as sound recording, remote control and games. There are 2 free games with this phone; Marble Madness and Tennis. Both games are 3D. Marble Madness was quite a novelty when I first got the phone; you tilt the phone to navigate a ball around a maze. The novelty soon wore off, but it's fun for a while, if slightly frustrating.

The Tennis game is... a tennis game. You run from side to side and hit the ball. This has kept me amused at many a bus stop. Cyber-shot is the camera, although I've never accessed it from the menu (there is a quick start camera button on the side of the phone). The phone comes with earphones which are quite good quality, and I found the sound quality when listening to the radio to be very good. The rest of the options are self-explanatory, although I did find it quite unusual that "alarms" (you can set up to 5) wasn't just put in "organizer". Also worth mentioning is that this phone allows you to use the flash as a VERY bright torch, which is most handy. The bluetooth connectivity is also excellent, and I found that all of the applications on this phone responded very quickly and effectively.

The phone comes with more than enough memory for general use, although if you want it to double-up as an mp3 player you'll probably have to buy yourself a larger memory card. The capacity for messages and contacts is excellent; you're unlikely to need to delete any text messages if you really don't want to. Messaging is very simple, and the phone's dictionary is reasonable; very important to me, as I use predictive text. When creating contacts, you can enter several numbers for each and scroll through them easily using the navigation keys. When assigning numbers to your contacts there are 6 different options from which to choose (e.g. work, home, fax), and each of these have different symbols so it's easy to differentiate if you're in a hurry to call someone; a feature that I found to be very helpful. During phonecalls, the volume can be adjusted using the camera's zoom buttons on the side and there is also the option to put the call onto loudspeaker, where the sound is far less fuzzy than I've experienced with previous phones.

On the side of the phone there's a small slider to switch the camera between viewing, video recording and photography mode, and above this is a button to switch the camera on. This is handy, as if you find yourself wanting to take a photograph immediately you don't have to search through the menu to find the camera application, or even unlock the phone. When you press it a small shutter will reveal the lens and it takes around 3 seconds for the camera to be ready to shoot. At first glance the shutter looks like a nice touch, but it is entirely useless; there's a layer of glass over it that picks up fingerprints insanely easily (I'm convinced that it actively attracts the damn things; it doesn't matter whether you touch it or not, it will be smeared in prints within 2 minutes of wiping it). Equally, if you scratch the glass cover, you're buggered. The shutter will do nought but taunt you with its deliberate inadequacies. The flash is excellent, just as you would expect in a normal camera (and thus quite a battery drain) and the photograph quality is excellent. The videos are not so great - good quality if you don't maximise them on your media player, but their original size is so tiny that they're likely to be useless unless you do.

But to me the ability to record videos is just an added extra - as a camera phone, you can't go far wrong with this one.

Overall, I think that the Sony Ericsson k850i is an excellent phone. It's a bit bulky and, in comparison with its competitors, perhaps a little heavy, but it's no brick. Despite its size it looks great, although its glossy finish gets covered in fingerprints very quickly. The camera is excellent, certainly the best of any phone that I've used and one of the best in its price rang; it has been described as "a camera with a phone" rather than a phone with a camera! The touch-buttons are cool, if slightly pointless, and this is a very easy phone to use with all of the applications that you're likely to need and a few extras that you'll probably never use. As it's a year on from when I bought it, I'm not sure how it now compares to others in its price range but, taking everything into account, I'd definitely still recommend this phone.