January 4th, 2009

SonyEricsson K800i Review

This is a post/review that I wanted to get out a LONG time ago. I used the SonyEricsson K800i for about a year (recently upgraded my phone contract and I now have the Nokia E71) and it was definitely one of the best phones (looks and feature wise) that I have owned.

More pictures at GSM-Arena.

The K800i Specs

Here are the basic specs of the K800i:

Dimensions: 105 x 47 x 22 mm
Screen Size: 240 x 320 pixels
Memory Card: Memory Stick Micro (M2)
USB: Yes (2.0)
3G: Yep! (384kbps)
Wlan: No
Camera: 3.15mp
MP3: Yes

For more details on the phone, visit GSM-Arena.

The Good

Camera: The camera on the SonyEricsson K800i is nothing short of amazing. The picture quality is superb even when taking photos during the night time. There really is no comparison of the K800i camera to most other built in cell phone cameras. The phone also has a built in xenon flash which is the same flash technology used in most personal cameras on the market today. The K800i also lets you automatically blog your photos to a photo blog powered by blogger.
Web Browsing: The built in web browser on the K800i is actually not too bad. There are two views for browsing which are landscape and portrait and you can save bookmarks and there is even a basic zoom. I always recommend using Opera Mini for browsing on a cell phone (which works well on the K800i) but the default K800i browser is not bad at all.
Video Calling: The K800i has a second camera (VGA) built onto the front of the phone which is specifically for video calling. I did a few video calls with the phone and as long as your network signal is strong, it works very well. The video and sound are very clear on the phone during video calls.
Battery Life: The thing that impressed me the most about this phone was how quickly it took to charge it and how long that charge actually lasted. GSM-Arena says it gets 7 hours talk time which by todays standards is not much but my experience was a bit different. I seemed to only have to charge the phone every 3-5 days which is the least amount of charge time out of the many phones that I have owned.

The Not So Good

Joystick: For some reason every SonyEricsson I have owned has had a joystick that after about 6 months of using it, gets sticky and horrible to use. For this reason, I will never by a SonyEricsson that has a joystick on it again, I would prefer a standard up, down, left, right button combo.
Memory Card: The K800i comes with an external card slot for a Memory Stick Micro (M2) card. As far as I know, all SonyEricssons only support Memory Stick Micro cards. The only problem I have with the Memory Stick Micro cards that is they are hellishly more expensive than the standard micro SD cards that a lot of other phones offer.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I was extremely happy with this phone for the year or so that I used it. The camera was brilliant, web browsing was good and the phone never gave me any real trouble over the time that I had it. If you are considering buying it, I would so go for it (I would actually recommend you check out the new cybershot range).

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