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Redefining the Impossible

K750i

K750i

Submitted by Peter on Sat Aug 27 2005 18:52 over 4 years ago

Sony Ericsson K750i has come so here is a potted review:

  • Nice, small, light. A tad wider and thicker than my old nokia 6610i but it's no brick.
  • Big screen, maybe twice the size of the nokia.
  • Camera is ok, not great. Here is a picture of my settee:
    images/Sofa.jpg
    This is at 'normal' compression rather than 'fine' and to my eye it's not as good as my Canon Powershot S1 which blows it away in most respects apart from small size. The picture it takes are fairly wide angle, I'd have trouble fitting the whole settee in the frame of my S1. You need to be pretty close to what you are taking photo's of or be prepared to use the digital zoom at the expense of resolution. The camera is still better than the one in the Nokia 6610i which can only be described as crap.
  • MP3 player is, well, an mp3 player. Good quality, even through speaker it makes a decent sound.
  • It plays mp3 ring tones. I've already set it up as I planned long go. Despite what the manual says there is no restriction on mp3 ringtones, it Just Worked.
  • USB cable is cool: the memory stick in the camera appears as a USB disk, you just copy files backwards and forwards. Didn't need any special software. I can use Salamander smile I think it can charge from the USB cable, it doesn't say in the manual but the battery icon gains the charging lightning strike which may be a clue.
  • I haven't played bluetooth yet, I suppose it works but I'd rather use the USB cable. I'm not a big fan of bluetooth, the Windows bluetooth stacks all seem overly complicated. I have to plug in a bluetooth dongle to use bluetooth, might as well plug a USB cable in and get something 20x faster and more reliable. Can still use phone with wife's jabra headset.
  • Looking through the tools I found something called 'light'. Wondered what it did and it turned on two bright white LED's intended as a replacement for flash. It's not going to floodlight a room but it could be useful in a nocturnal crisis.
  • It is heavily branded with vodafone. Press the wrong thing in the menu and you're into Vodafone Live and running up your GPRS bills.
  • The radio is ok, even through the speaker. It's auto-search could only find two stations but others were around. It is supposed to have RDS but it wasn't showing me any station names.
  • It can take video's but I haven't tried that yet. It has got video editing software built in (!).
  • Haven't tried email client yet. It cannot be any worse than the Nokia 6600 I tried at work which had no option to download headers only.
  • It has a voice recorder, voice activated dialling, voice activated answer, you can swear at it and it says sorry.
  • Under the bluetooth stuff I haven't installed is something to remotely control your powerpoint presentations from the phone.
  • Have I forgotten anything? Oh yes, you can make phone calls with it.

What I think I will miss most from Nokia:

  • cannot set a time for profiles to end: will have to remember to manually switch from silent to normal when I finish work (especially with umbungo ringtone).
  • every nokia seems to work with every nokia charger. Very useful when you leave your charger at home, wherever you go people have nokias. But then again, if I can charge through the USB cable I am fairly well served wherever there is a pc.

Conclusion: nice phone.

3 Comments

Peter Says:

Mon Aug 29 2005 21:25 over 4 years ago

More bullet points:

  • close-up photos (< 3 feet) are out of focus. Do I need to switch to macro mode? Fish-eye distortion comes in anyway (maybe because of the small lens). Pictures also look noisy. This is something I have come across before, because a camera has high resolution, it doesn't mean squat if the picture is noisy.
  • call quality seems very good. Sounds clearer than I am used to (Nokia 6610i and DECT landline). Signal strength at home seems low but made long call (on vodafone stop-the-clock 60mins for price of 3 deal smile ) and didn't get a drop-out.
  • shortcut access is nicely designed: the nokia had shortcuts which seemed no quicker than the menu's so I never got into using them but the shortcuts on this seem much quicker.
  • I keep forgetting to close the nice shutter over the camera lens.
  • Set up call divert on old phone to divert calls to new till I get phone numbers sorted out.

Peter

Dean Says:

Fri Sep 02 2005 11:44 over 4 years ago

It is like I no longer need mine to arrive. No, seriously, good tips/hints. I have a PAC from CPH. Are you trying to keep your old number? Voda said they could not do the number transfer as it was a online purchase. I wrote to them (I think) saying OK, but once I have the phone in my hand can you transfer the number. No response yet, but I used NTL www mail so I’m not 100% sure it went.

Peter Says:

Fri Sep 02 2005 17:52 over 4 years ago

Sorry if I am spoiling the exploration of your new toy. It is a very nice phone. It's not perfect but nothing is.

I have to admit that when I ordered the phone I accidently ordered two: I ran through the ordering once to get a good idea of how much it would cost, then went through it again properly and probably didn't notice the previous order was still valid (damn cookies).

It's not a major problem, I could send the second phone back but it's such a nice phone and the deal is so good that I would rather knock Bisi's tariff down to the cheapest until I can cancel it and give her the other phone: this would probably save me money and I get a second power supply and USB cable for work. It also means that our phone numbers would only be one digit apart (hers would end in 0, mine would be the same but end with a 2) which is kinda cute and also means one less number to memorise.

Peter

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