Sony Ericsson K810 Review

Just like the rest of the new phones of this manufacturer (including К800), which are not smartphones (Symbian OS), К810 uses the standard software without any serious innovations. Unlike the Walkman phones, the Flash-animated themes, which change the image drastically and are much cooler than the standard one, which change only their colors and pictures and not the icons, are not maintained here.

The Home screen shows standard service information, including the strength of coverage/battery, the name of the operator, the time and the date. Here logically there are icons, signaling of missed calls, unread messages, set alarm/Bluetooth, etc.

The four directions of the joystick are shortcuts, which you can arrange as you like from the settings menu. You can access the other shortcuts from the „Activity menu” button (right of the right soft button), by which you can see the currently set applications. The Sony Ericsson phones allow for multi-tasking, e.g. you can leave the musical player on, while you’re writing a text message.

The main menu is visualized as a grid of 3х4 icons, each of them corresponding to a button from the numeric keyboard for shortcut. The icons are not animated, but, when pointed at, they can be replaced with other, slightly bigger ones. Unlike К800, when you point at one of the icons of К810, it starts to ‘vibrate’: it increases and decreases. The submenus look like lists with horizontal tabs. There are no shortcuts here.

Phonebook:

As far as saving numbers to the phonebook is concerned, there's almost no difference with the previous models; you can save up to 1000 contacts, while each of them can store several numbers (up to 2500 numbers in total), e-mails and web addresses, as well as a personal picture and ring tone, or video-tone for indication when you have an incoming call. You can add contacts to groupsbut you cannot set a common ring tone or a caller ID to a given group. As a whole, this function is planned to be used only when you want to send a message to more than one contact for example. Finding a contact is done by directly entering letters from the keypad, but unfortunately only the first word of the name considered during the search. However, an option we really liked was to sort the names both by first and last name. Still, if you’ve sorted them by last name, you will not be able to search by First name, which now appears as second word.

A new number is dialed from the standard semi-transparent background on the homescreen. There are no options for personalizing the font, color or the background.

Organizer:

The organizer icon is in the main menu. Its options include calendar, tasks, notes, alarms, calculator, timer, stopwatch, code memo, applications links, and synchronization option.

The Calendar can be viewed for a month, week or a day; the latter option shows the events, set for the particular day, as well as the possibility to add new options. When you want to add appointments, you select the starting time, duration and the reminder’s time. You can add details about the venue of the event, as well as a description. You have the option of setting it as an All day event (all birth dates from the contacts list are added as such) and to include recurrence options (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly).

You can also save simple Tasks (reminder for Task or Phone Call) or write a plain note. The menu also houses a Calculator with basic functionality, a Countdown timer and a Stopwatch capable of storing up to nine results. We think that the Code Memo option is useless and we will prefer to have a “save” where we can save text information, LOCKED (not coded) by a password.

Voice commands:

The voice commands are activated by holding the Volume Down button, and you must hold the phone next to your head in order to use them - they do not utilize the loudspeaker. This makes them absolutely inconvenient to use and we even had a problem with only one contact saved. To sum it up - the system simply does not work and it's completely useless, there's no room for making a comparison with the one used in Symbian S60 phones that have speaker-independent voice commands for making calls and opening applications. The phone has about 70MB of internal memory that can be expanded through Memory Stick Micro (M2) cards, which are Sony's smallest dimension-wise cards at the moment.