Sony Ericsson K750 review

Contacts

The phone book can store up to 500 contacts each with another 5 number fields. SE say that this can be increased depending on the amount of information you have under each contact, but I do not have up to 500 contacts in my phonebook so I never got to verify this. You can also save an email address, a web address, job title, company name, full business address (including postcode) as well as a note (additional miscellaneous info) and even a birthday category. In addition to the above, you can also assign a separate ringtone to each contact, a voice command for each stored number and a picture for each contact. The phone book has some nice touches to it like displaying a picture when a sms/mms is received as well as a large (not thumb nail) picture when receiving a call from a contact in your phonebook if an image has been assigned to that person.

Scrolling through the phone book is easy. You can either use the joystick by going down or up, or you can use the alpha numeric keypad and type in the name or first few letters of the contact you are searching for. For contacts with numerous number, you just shift the joystick left or right and this will go though all of the stored numbers for that contact.

Another cool contact related feature is the K750i, like many other SE phones can support sending/receiving all contacts via bluetooth or infrared. This means if you are transferring contacts from another SE phone, the task becomes a piece of cake using this feature. Your old phonebook from your current device is identically copied maintaining all edited fields and contact images etc to your K750i or vice-versa.

Synchronising is the method you'd need to use if transferring contacts from outlook or another mobile phone/PDA that doesn't support sending/receiving all contacts by bluetooth. Synchronising I found more of a task as the field formats used on SE phones are different to other manufacturers and even Microsoft outlook. This means that if you have numbers in some fields that the K750i does not recognise, they will not be copied. It took me about an hour transferring contacts from a Nokia 6230i to the K750i after synchronising the two with outlook, as I had to go through each contact and manually edit all the excluded numbers. Not a great experience.

You can copy all numbers from your sim to phone or vice-versa as long as you have sufficient memory in either direction of your chosen destination. You can also assign 9 speed dials excluding voicemail in your phonebook.     

Messaging

As with most SE phones, the inbox is combined with both received sms & mms messages. The sender's name or number is displayed as well as the first few words of the message. The number of messages Sony Ericsson say the phone can hold is 210. These are shared between inbox, drafts, outbox and sent but no limits to any one of the 4. In other words, if all your folders are empty, you should be able to store 210 messages in your inbox. So far I have 87 messages in my inbox and around 60 in my sent items but have yet to receive any alerts
telling me of limited space.

The mms options are well thought out. You can create a new clip using an image, video, sound and of course text plus a combination of these. As you'd expect, you can either insert an already created item or you can send one you have not yet created by recording the clip, picture or sound.. When sending images, the handset will give you the option to rescale the image so that the intended recipient can receive it, especially if it has been taken in high image quality, which obviously increases the size of the picture.      

The K750i can also send and receive emails as it has a POP3/IMAP4 client protocol. The set up of this is quite simple as long as you have your current settings from your ISP. Image attachment support is a lot better than before on previous models both when sending and receiving. You can now add multiple attachment types. You can also customise most settings in this menu like receiving the header only or full message (header & text). There is also a ‘check interval' feature which I find useful. When set, this will automatically poll for any new messages at a set interval ranging from 5 minutes right up to 12 hours. This, if set to a low interval time can add a lot of data charges to your bill, but with 512mb per month from my network provider O2, I allow it to poll for messages every hour and therefore have new emails delivered straight to me, quite similar to ‘push email technology' - handy if you need to read emails throughout the day.

‘My Friends' is a new feature that works very similar to instant messaging. You can send ‘real time' messages between fellow contacts that are currently online. I used this feature briefly using my msn account via GPRS from my service provider O2. It worked fairly well and allowed me to change my online status that other contacts saw, as well as creating a chat group. Setup of this service is relatively simple as long as you have an existing instant messaging account.