Sony Ericsson Cybershot K800

Permalink: Sony Ericsson Cybershot K800 by Franz Bicar

Sony Ericsson is known for its Cybershot phones. A lot of mobile companies have been trying to surpass Sony when it comes to camera phones, but you have to admit, whenever the word “camera phone” is hears, its always Sony Ericsson that comes to mind.

Once again, Sony Ericsson has shown why they are leading the camera phone race, specially with their Cybershot K800 camera phone. Not to disappoint anybody, the K800 features a GPRS and UMTS support, memory card slot, great camera, a great MP3 player, stereo Bluetooth support, FM radio, integrated image blogging service and Google search and last but not least - a great 3.2 megapixel camera with an integrated real xenon flash.

First we go to the phones design. The k800 follows most K-series phone designs done by Sony Ericsson. The phone has dimensions of 105 x 47 x 22 mm and weighs 115 g. The handset, available in black and brown, places its speaker grill at the upper part. A VGA camera for video calls is positioned in the right side of the grill.

It also sports a QVGA resolution TFT display that is beautifully surrounded by a mirror frame. The display protecting glass also has a mirror-like effect applied to it so when the display is off, the whole area becomes a uniform reflecting surface. The phone sports a 2-inch TFT display with 262 000 colors and a QVGA resolution of 240 x 320 pixels. The display is very good and offers vivid colors and wide viewing angle.

The phone also supports external memory as it has a Memory Stick Micro (M2) card slot on its left side along with a PLAY/STOP key for the music player. Pressing it turns on the music player which starts playing the last playlist used. The Music player starts in the background only scrolling the artist and song name in the upper part of the screen. The music player in fact is directly copied from the Walkman phones series - it’s just been stripped of any Walkman branding and there’s no MegaBass equalizer preset.

There is also the FM radio capability. Again, it’s the usual Sony Ericsson radio with RDS support and 20 stations memory. It has the same quality as the radio seen in K750. A cool innovation is the implementation of the Identify Music feature.

On the right side, you can see the camera key which serves as the double purpose of a camera shortcut key and a camera release key. The Infrared port is located below it. In the upper part of the same side of the phone we see the two volume control keys which are used for zooming in and out when using the phone’s camera.

As with any other current Sony Ericsson phone the phone’s visual interface is totally customizable through themes. They change the overall looks of the interface including the main menu icons.

The K800’s phonebook has a maximum capacity of 1000 contacts, but you can have a total of 2500 numbers for those 1000 contacts. All those can be ordered either by first or last name. As usual the available fields include: 5 different phone numbers, 3 email addresses, 1 web address, a picture, a ringtone, a voice command used for voice dialing, position, company, company address, home address, a general note and a birthday date. A good thing is that the birthday date can be automatically transferred to the Calendar. Another positive change is that now you can see the entire information stored on a given contact without the need to enter the editing mode.

Messaging is almost the same with other SE phones. The messages and emails are stored in the phone’s memory with the exception of emails which also could be stored on the memory card. The My Friends chat service is also present here but that is network dependent. The only new thing here is the new set of emoticons which are quite amusing and lively.

The phone supports SMS, MMS, and email and more importantly RSS feeds. The RSS feeds support is nicely implemented. You can update the individual feeds one by one or as a whole. The feeds themselves are viewed in the NetFront web browser.

The MMS options are as good as always especially when you have nice applications such as the Video DJ which allows you to let your creative spirits soar high in the skies and literally create your own videos or video messages.

The email client is also pretty decent for a phone without OS like Symbian or Windows Mobile. It supports POP3 and SMTP and allows for entering a separate password for the SMTP server. There is no fixed limit for the email attachments size.

The first problem that you will probably encounter with the K800 is its keypad. The keys are made out of a rubber-like material and are generally easy to distinguish horizontally but not vertically. The keys around the joystick are pretty bad in that aspect too since you can hardly distinguish the separating lines between them without taking a look at them. All the keys are pretty small and are hard to use even by a female hand.

Now we go the the interesting part. The camera of the K800 is supposed to be one of the best cameras that comes along with any phone. The K800 camera is simply beautiful with images that are crisp and clear. And to think that it comes from a 3.2 MP camera. SE really did a great job with this phone’s camera, no doubt about that.

Besides the USB support and the Infrared port, the handset offers the usual connectivity capabilities such as 3G and GPRS for fast data transfers, video calls and streaming content.

The handset supports Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP profile support which means that you could use stereo Bluetooth speakers with it and that is something you don’t see in every phone nowadays. Another notable thing about the excellent Bluetooth support is the Human Interface Device (HID) profile which allows the phone to be used as a remote control for PC and other Bluetooth-enabled devices.

K800 is definitely one of the must-have phones out there. Its superb camera, good display and functionalities are something that many men would fall for.

Sources:
http://www.phonearena.com
http://www.mobileburn.com
http://spicygadget.com