Sony Ericsson K800 Review

Sony Ericsson presented the K800 as their latest shooter to replace your pocket camera, as well as a lot of other multimedia gadgets you've got used to carrying with you, and it combines their functionality in a single device. The successor of the K750 upgrades the camera resolution from 2 to 3.2 mega pixels and replaces the ordinary LED flash with the Xenon one, which is like the ones used in stand-alone cameras.

Carrying the “Cyber-Shot” branding, the Sony Ericsson K800 is the first handset of the manufacturer's multimedia series designed as “cameraphones” (Sony's digital camera line is also called Cyber-Shot). It is similar to the Walkman series which consist of music-oriented phones that the Japaneese-Swedish company  offers with great success, including on the US market (through the W600 that was launched with Cingular). As a multimedia-oriented phone, the K800 pays attention to music too so it comes with stereo headphones (well they're definitely not the best ones), as well as a PC connection cable for transferring multimedia content between the phone and the PC.

The K800 is in a stylish candybar design with straight lines and right-angled contours mainly, and the only movable parts are the camera's protective cover and the battery cover. This makes the construction of the phone very solid, as our only remark is the battery cover's minor movement, which is really insignificant.

The used colors are black, dark grey and the contrasting metallic silver, and we really don't like the fact that the three of them are shades of dark grey (black) – something that spoils the idea of a classy and expensive phone and gives it a somewhat cheap look. The front side is made of metal with black brushed finish, while the rest is made of cheap-looking matte plastic. An exception is the camera's protective cover with its glossy surface, but it's easily sullied with fingerprints that give it an unpleasant look.

The handset feels solid in the hand although it's not that heavy - 4 oz (115g) and when carried in the pocket it is clearly noticeable due to its thickness of 0.9”, which definitely does not classify it as a “slim” phone according to today's standards, set initially by the legendary RAZR V3's 14 mm and reaching the noteworthy 6.9mm of the X820 by Samsung.               



The display of the K800 is a major update to its predecessor - while the colors are still 262k, the resolution is two times higher as the 176x220 of the K750 is upgraded to a QVGA one - 240x320 pixels. Combined with the small physical screen size of only 2 inches, it makes the pixels really miniature and thus gives the displayed images a very detailed look. The display is a high-contrast one and relatively bright, and you can clearly see it and read text on it even in direct sun light, but as the surface is very smooth and reflective, it is easily “stained” with fingerprints which reduce the visibility - you should often clean it. Unfortunately, the K800's display is not as bright as its rival's (the N73) one, which also has more saturated colors and a bigger size.      



The keyboard is not as good as the display at all - it occupies a very small part of the phone which in turn means the physical size of each of the buttons is reduced. Just below the display are the typical Sony Ericsson keys – two software ones, Back, Clear, Shortcut and Internet. The latter two are so small that you have to “look for” them before pressing one of these, while in order to do it you have to use the top of your finger. It is very hard to distinguish the separate buttons by only touching them, while only the joystick feels different as it is raised and the surface surrounding it is slightly lowered. Yet, using it is definitely not a great pleasure because it's hard to move and press, which is also the case with the rest of the buttons. The stick is lowered at the center, which makes its edges “sharper” and thus very uncomfortable to use for longer periods of time as it hurts your finger. This shape is designed to prevent the joystick slip when your hands are wet, but it would've been far better if Sony Ericsson had just used some other material - like some special rubber for example.



The numeric keys are rectangle-shaped with very little space left between them and they're slightly angled so you can feel the separate buttons by moving your finger over the keypad's surface from top to button. But they're quite hard to distinguish if you move your hand in the opposite direction or horizontally, so you would find it very difficult to dial a number without making a mistake if you're not looking at the keypad. Having in mind this and the fact that the buttons are hard to press, we think that the keyboard is very uncomfortable to use. The only positive thing we found about it was the backlight - it is in pale violet that is almost white at the area behind the keys and the light is equally spread, so the symbols are easy to read even in complete darkness.         



The rest of the buttons are the Play/Pause (located on the left side) and volume keys and the camera key (on the right), while at the top is the Power button which also acts as a shortcut to the profiles. The keys' locations are the same as with previous models like the K750, W810, etc. However, there are two new miniature buttons located above the display, at the two sides of the speaker and the front facing camera for video calling. These two are shortcuts for the camera and despite their ridiculously small size, they're probably the phone's most comfortable ones. As for the camera, it is located on the back, under a glossy protective cover, which slides open when pushed in the down direction (considering the handset is in horizontal position) and thus takes up less space than the K750's one, which slides to the left. Opening the cover is not hard at all although there's no mechanism to help you. When opened, it stays put in one place as there's almost no movement and no chance of it sliding back accidentally. Just next to it is the flash which does really well despite its small size. The memory expansion slot is located on the left side, under a plastic protective cap, which is relatively hard to remove and you should not worry about it falling off, at least until the phone is still new.

Interface:

The stand-by screen is a standard one as small areas at the top and the bottom are “darkened” to make the system information (signal strength, battery and soft buttons) easier to read. An interesting option is that the clock can be displayed with large semi-transparent digits over the background image, which may also be an animated. The four directions of the joystick act as shortcuts, while pressing it opens the main menu which is displayed as a 3x4 grid of icons (they're not animated but when one is pointed at, another larger image is displayed). Unlike Nokia phones, their number is only twelve and there's no scrolling.

The submenus are viewed as a list and there's support for numerous tabs, but the numeric keys have no shortcut functionality here and by pressing any of them, you move to the last option in the list. The letter of the button is displayed (like when entering text) but in fact you cannot use the letters to “jump” to various options - i.e. if we have a field called “Videos” at the fourth row, then we can't reach it neither by pressing 4, nor the 8 button (“TUV”) - only by navigation with the joystick. Not only entering and moving through the various menus is slow, but it's the same story when you want to go back to the stand-by screen - you have to press the “Back” key numerous times or you have to hold it for a while - either way it takes way too long.



For personalizing your phone, you have several preloaded themes, but they only change the background image and are definitely not as good as the W810's ones, which also change the way the menu is displayed and its icons. To say it, the K800's themes are mundane and boring - at least the four that came with the phone.

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, e-mails and web addresses, as well as a personal picture and ring tone for indication when you have an incoming call. You can add contacts to groups but you have to do it one but 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. Symbian S60 phones lack this option and contacts are always sorted by Last Name, so they are displayed as “Last, First” and there's no “First, Last” view.



Organizer:

The Organizer offers the standard functionality for a Sony Ericsson phone of this class. You have five Alarms that can be assigned different ring tones to and a Calendar with an option to set a reminder to the appointments, while you can also save Tasks and simple Notes.



The menu also houses a Calculator with basic functionality, a Countdown timer and a Stopwatch capable of storing up to nine results. This type of Organizer can never be compared to the one used in the N73 for example, which features a practical active desktop and is simply a few ideas ahead, more convenient and useful.



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 like the N73 (a K800 rival as a multimedia device) that has 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.

Messaging:

Besides the standard and multimedia messages, the messaging menu also houses the e-mail client, which makes it easier for you to send and receive large files that are not suitable for MMS, like full-sized pictures for example. Entering text is aided by T9 but when it's turned off (when adjusting the e-mail settings for example), you realize how horrible the keyboard really is. The preloaded templates are intended to help you save time typing in often used phrases and sentences. What we found weird is that this menu houses a RSS Reader, which is convenient to quickly view the content of a given web site without loading it - we checked phoneArena's news in an instant.  

Internet:

For loading Internet pages there is a WAP 2.0 browser which can operate on the UMTS network for greater speed, where it is supported. Thanks to the high resolution (240x320), viewing web sites is very convenient, but still there's no room for comparison with the brilliant web browser smartphones like the N73 have.



One of the handset's major drawbacks is the 3-band network support, as this means it is not global roaming capable. The K800 supports 900/1800/1900 GSM and 2100 MHz UMTS, whereas the K790 phone has two versions - K790a with 850/1800/1900 MHz GSM and K790i with 900/1800/1900 MHz, while the UMTS is replaced with EDGE, which the K800 lacks. That means that you can take advantage of all of the phone's capabilities only if you use it on a 3G network in Europe or Asia. And even if you're in any of these areas, you will have to count on the slow GPRS when your network has no UMTS support, as your K800 has no EDGE.

PC suite:

For a local connection with a PC, the K800 comes with a USB cable and a CD with software by the manufacturer.

During the installation, several language options are available. The actual application consists of four parts which can be selectively installed. The PC suite allows synchronization of contacts, notes and file transfer. The Adobe Photoshop Album SE is used to store and edit pictures taken with the phone. The QuickTime application is used for viewing video and audio files.

The Disc2Phone software is used to search for music in the user computer or audio CDs, convert audio tracks to MP3 format and copy tracks to a Sony  Memory Stick for listening on the phone. In order for Disk2Phone to work, the phone must be restarted and put in File Transfer mode in which most phone features don't work which of course is very annoying.

Switching back to Phone mode again involves restarting of the phone. Unlike Motorola's PC suite, Sony Ericsson one does not allow the user to compose and send messages from the PC. The contacts, notes, calendar and to-do lists can be synchronized, but unlike the Moto's software, the information can not be managed from the PC (edit, delete, add), just synchronized. Also, the only bulk synchronization is allowed, whereas with Motorola allows the user only selected contacts to be synchronized.

The Image Editor allows the user to do basic manipulation on images stored on the PC and then upload them on the phone. The options include zooming, brightness, contrast and color management.

The MMS Home Studio offers an easy and fast way for creating multimedia messages including backgrounds, text, sounds, pictures and animation. The ready MMS can not be sent directly from the PC, but again must be downloaded to the phone first and then sent from it.

The File Manager simply launches a Windows Explorer and allows the user to browse the store images, sounds or videos on the Phone's internal memory or on the Memory card.

The last feature is the Mobile Networking Wizard. In a nutshell, it allows the user to use its mobile phone's data capabilities to connect a PC or laptop to the internet. Depending on the settings, the user can select either the slower circuit switched data (CSD / HSCSD) or packet data such as GPRS / EDGE / 3G.

Overall, Sony Ericsson PC suite functionality is limited and only features worth mentioning are the basic synchronization and MMS composition.

IR & BLuetooth:

A connection with other devices can be established both through IrDA, which is located on the right side of the phone, and Bluetooth (the version is 2.0) while a great plus is that the trendy A2DP is featured. It allows you to stream stereo audio wirelessly from the phone's player to a compatible device like wireless headphones, mini stereo or car audio systems supporting that kind of transfer.

Camera:

The K800 focuses mostly on the multimedia and it's sold mainly as a camera phone because of its 3-megapixel camera with Xenon flash. It is located on the back of the handset, while the part where it stands is slightly raised. It increases the phone's thickness a little and spoils the overall design that consists mainly of straight lines, but maybe that was unavoidable as the camera's components had to fit in somehow.

Three or four seconds after removing the protective slider of the shooter (or by holding the dedicated button on the right side), the landscape interface of the camera is loaded and shows indicators about which mode it is currently in (taking pictures or video) and the amount of photos that can be taken with the memory available. Pressing the left soft key opens the Settings menu which is displayed as horizontal list and allows you to change any of the options: here you have Shooting mode, a great variety of scenes, effects (B&W, Negative, Sepia, Solarize), White balance.



We didn't like the animated icons as it's hard to understand what each one is for, so you have to read the label describing it, but it is displayed only after you point at the particular icon. When this menu (Settings) is closed and then entered again, it is pointing at the last option you've used - this is very clever and convenient, as it may save you a lot of time if you often change the same setting (“Focus” for example).



The two buttons above the display act as shortcuts to two of the menus - the upper one is for Scenes, while the lower is for Shoot Mode (Normal, Best Pic, Panorama, Frames). Scenes change the settings that the phone uses when taking a picture, as Sports for example increases the shutter speed so that a moving object can be captured and not show up blurry on the photo. Yet the Shooting Modes are of greater interest. Best Pic takes nine shots in a row and then lets you select which one to save, as this could be very useful when taking pictures of “objects that you have very little time to frame”. The Panorama mode takes three pictures which the phone combines in a single one with panoramic view, i.e. with much greater width than height. However, the there's only an option for a horizontal panorama and we'd have liked to see a vertical one included too. The last mode is Frames and it's very funny as it has 15 preset frames that add extra mood to your pictures.



Pictures:

The quality of the pictures taken with the K800 is one of the best a mobile phone can offer, and after a comparison with four more 3-megapixel camera phones, it shared the first place with the D900 slider by Samsung. Despite the fact that the images were not very detailed and color reproduction was not quite correct, the K800 was one of the best in the night shots test and the undisputed winner in taking pictures indoors with low or no light – that's where the Xenon flash demonstrated its undeniable capabilities, surpassing the weaker LED “flashes” on the rest of the tested models. As a whole, the pictures taken with the camera are very good for a mobile phone, but unfortunately the situation with the Video is totally different. There's only support for a 176x144 pixels (QCIF) resolution, at 15 fps, which makes taken videos really awful. Yet you will read a “High-quality video selected” notice when choosing the video mode. You have a digital Image stabilizer at your disposal, but it seems useless, as no matter what you use, at such a resolution, you will still be unable to see anything.              

Sony Ericsson K800	Canon SD200

Audio:

The phone's music playback functionality is not bad at all too - the Audio player supports the most popular file types, including MP3, AAC and WAV, and lets you sort them by Artist (and then also by Album).You can also create your own playlists and organize your music the way you want. There are Loop and Shuffle options during Playback, as well as several preset equalizers which you can also fine-tune manually. The Playback interface is quite simplified but still displays all the information you need. However, the fact that FastForward/Rewind is done through the same buttons used for Next/Previous track, can be very inconvenient as you have to hold these buttons to use them this way, and once in a while you just change the song unintentionally.

When talking about music reproduction, a major disadvantage is that the headphones from the package do not have a 3.5mm jack as with the W(alkman)-series and you have to use the earbuds from the box - you cannot replace them with something better. The quality of the sound they produce does not impress at all: there's no air, everything sounds flat, and the high frequencies are distorted and instead of clear drum instruments you hear something quite different. The sound quality can be classified as average and coming close to good when compared to other phones, but there's no way to compare it to a good music player equipped with adequate headphones.



For testing the video player, we sent two video files via Bluetooth - a MP4 one encoded with the H.264 codec and the other was the same file but converted to .3GPP (the file size was reduced from 17 to 4 MB consequently). The first (high-quality) file was saved in the Music and the other in the Video folder, and thus only the latter could be viewed. The high-quality video could only be listened to, but there was no picture. The choppy 3GPP video could be viewed in fullscreen (landscape) and the sound could be heard via the headphones, but the quality of this file type is just much lower than the far better MP4/H.264. So we just cannot talk about watching high-quality video with the K800, which is a pity. You can only use MPEG4 with H.263 encoding, but the image quality in this case is still not good enough.    

The FM Radio is an addition to the music player, and it offers a nice interface and RDS support for receiving information about the stations. You can save up to 20 of them with the option of storing their names too. Of course, as an antenna you have to use the headphones from the package and they must be plugged in even when you want to listen through the speaker of the phone.



Software:




The K800 supports JAVA applications and the phone comes with a few amusing games (which will suit various people as they're different types) and a hilarious application for editing pictures (applying funny effects to people's faces). Games are loaded pretty fast and they might “cost” you a lot of time because they don't get you bored too quickly and offer some nice graphics. But in case you do get bored with them, you can easily download new JAVA games.

Performance:

Unfortunately, the speed of the phone is definitely not among the highest ones. Having in mind that it is not a smartphone, this should be one of its major advantages over devices like the N73, but it's not - the navigation is kind of slow when entering submenus. Loading pictures is relatively quick while you can see that an image is initially rendered a little blurry and then after a while it is displayed in good quality; the camera and applications loading speed are satisfactory, but we prefer waiting for the latter two than while navigating through the menus.

Unlike our expectations, in the signal strength test the K800 did better than Nokia's high end phones (N73 and N80), as its overall level is definitely above the average and is very close to high. That's not the case with the sound quality during a call, as the volume level is average, but the voice is still clearly and realistically reproduced.

Conclusion:

The K800 strives to combine multimedia functionality in a candybar-designed device with solid built quality and acceptable dimensions. But only its camera manages to perform at a high level, as at the moment it is one of the best ones featured in a mobile phone thanks to its Xenon flash. Unfortunately, this is somehow overshadowed by the low-quality camcoder, the cheap headphones in the package and the fact that it is impossible to watch high-quality video with the handset. It does very well with the phone function, as the signal strength is very good, the battery is strong and the voices during conversation sound realistic, but unfortunately, the keyboard is really uncomfortable and inappropriate for intense usage.