Peter's Blog

Time to compare Sony-Ericsson K750i and W800. Well, they are essentially the same phone except:

• W800 is orange and white. Plastic is not as shiny, possibly won't wear as well as silver k750i.
• Number buttons have a nicer feel but the nipple thing makes my fingers sore. It might loosen up with more wear.
• When it powers up you are asked if you want a whizzy phone or just a music player. I think this is so you can listen to music on an aeroplane without fear of plummeting to your death.
• W800 has nicer icons
• Earphones plug into an 3.5mm adapter which plugs into the phone. I think this is so you can swap the headphones for white ones and try to make people think you have an cool iPod rather than a dull walkman.
• W800 comes with 512m memory stick rather than paltry 64m
• Camera lens cover opens with a little switch thing. I think I prefer the big sliding shutter on the k750i.

Apart from that they are the same. Identical USB cable, charger etc.

Annoyance: when you plug the K750i into your computer you are hastled to install about five lots of drivers just to get the external filesystem to work. Especially annoying if you only want to use the phone as a memory stick. When you plug the W800 you have to do it all again. Argh.

I got around to cancelling my old carphone warehouse contract and they offered me a free Sony-Ericsson w800 (like k750i but with 500M memory card), a £9 a month tarriff with 400 minutes/month off-peak and £90 cash back so it all ends up costing me £12 in a year. They said it was cheaper for them than disconnecting my number(?)

They offerred me nothing when my contract was due for renewal.

The tip is to ring customer services and ask to be disconnected, don't ask for an upgrade. That way you get through to the loyalty team who are more generous.

Phone is orange and white, not really me, so I've offerred it to my wife. Might forget to install the 500M memory card...

Nero Recode, path of Nero Premium 7 can convert AVI files into .mp4 files. This is interesting because it means I can play them on my k750i phone. Just plonk them in the D:\MSSEMC\Media files\video\camera directory on the phone via USB. I recoded them to 100k/s so an eight second video used 800k. At this rate an hour long program would need 360M and hence a 512M or 1G memory stick. It plays in a window within the screen that is about 1 inch diagonal so it's not good for immersive home theatre. Also have to wonder what it does for battery life.

The player has no fast forward button so it's no use for watching Lost.

I tried editing videos from the k750i mobile on my pc. I copied the files from \MSSEMC\Media Files\video\camera on the camera's virtual drive to the pc using USB. The files all have a .3gp file extension. I tried opening them in pinnacle studio but it did not recognise the file format, even when opening them as *.*. I tried nero vision and that did not list .3gp as a supported file format but did open it as *.*.

However, even when recorded in 'high quality' the videos were pretty poor quality, not worth putting on a DVD unless the content is really worth it.

Now, when does my phone contract expire...?

Wanted to copy a photo to my k750i to use as wallpaper. I used the USB drive feature to copy the photo to d:\DCIM\100MSDCF where the other camera photos are but it refused to show up in the 'Pictures' explorer.

I eventually got it to list by renaming it in the same pattern as the existing files, DSC00025.JPG. Then I could copy it into the phone memory.

Some more tips for the k750i camera-phone:

• In camera mode, press * to turn the light on and off
• Also in camera mode, press 7 to turn 'night mode' on and off. 'Night mode' seems to slow the 'shutter speed', giving less digital noise on indoor pictures at the expense of blurriness if the subject is moving.
• The joystick can be used to switch from still camera to video mode
• When filming videos, don't be tempted to hold the phone in 'portrait' mode unless you have some way of rotating the videos when you play them (maybe put your tv on it's side).

More on the wonder that is the Sony Ericsson k750i phone:

• Looking through the usb drive properties I found this:
  
  which implies that for some USB memory devices you don't have to mess around 'stopping' the drive before you unplug it. This is nice to know.
• this page gives a taste of what can be done with the bluetooth remote control feature. Essentially the phone becomes a bluetooth mouse and keyboard so you can drive your pc from it. Nice idea but only really useful to control an mp3 player or powerpoint. Apparently Sony Ericsson do software to configure it for different applications.

Things I don't like about the phone:

• the vibrate is too weedy, I cannot feel it. I could stick the phone somewhere sensitive but that would make it more awkward to answer.
• the 'go back' key (don't know what else to call it and cannot draw the icon) that you press and hold to go back to the desktop does not hang up on calls.
• the actions of the left and right function keys sometimes swap around unintuitively.
• browsing through pictures is too slow

I had been idly wondering whether it was possible to store html pages on the memory stick of the k750i mobile phone and view them on the go. I figure this would be great for carrying information around in my pocket. Well today I was playing with the web browser and found a 'save page' option which stored the page I was viewing on the memory stick.

So it turns out that you can use the USB connection to store html or even simple .txt files in the directory \MSSEMC\Media Files\webpage and view them on the phone by opening My Items/Web Pages. You can create subdirectories in the directory to organise the files as you like. Just plug the phone in, allow Windows to mount an external USB drive, then copy the files with windows explorer. You have to 'stop' the USB drive and unplug the phone before the files appear in the phone's browser.

With html files it is possible to use the <small> tag to make the text smaller and see more on the screen (I haven't found an option in the phone's settings to control font size).

I tried setting a bookmark for my test page but got 'currently unavailable' when I tried to save it. Don't know why this could be. Battery is flat and I have to go out so I'll investigate this later.

I feel a raft of cool ideas coming on from this.

Picasa can import pictures from cameras. It can hook into the windows XP WIA stuff (see here). In fact, as well as my Canon Powershot S1 it can also handle the K750i phone. There is only one problem I found with the way it imports: I could not see how to get it to delete the pictures from the camera once it had imported them. This is actually a bit of a pain as I have to delete them either through the camera (Canon) or file manager/salamander (K750i). Paintshop Photo Album has a nice checkbox for me to tick during the import process. Also PSPA automatically dumps the files in a directory named after the import date. Picasa prompts you for a name. I'm happy to file them by import date and organise them with labels.

Speaking of Paintshop Photo Album, they have bought out a new version but are charging for the upgrade. I don't think I'll bother to upgrade it, I'll wait paitently for picasa to evolve.

The more I use the K750i Phone/camera/mp3 player the more I like it. Some tips:

• when viewing photo's you can press the 'horizontal' button to view the pictures with the camera on it's side. This is good because the screen is taller than it is wide so you get a better view of landscape pictures.
• when in horizontal viewing mode you can use the + and - 'volume' keys to zoom in and out of the picture. You can also use the 1 and 3 keys to zoom. Not sure why it cannot zoom in the default view mode. With pictures taken at highest resolution it is a bit sluggish in responding to changes in zoom size, 2 seconds or so, similar to the sluggishness when stepping to a different picture.
• when you take a photo it is displayed so you can admire it. If you want to take another photo, press the photo trigger button again and it goes back into viewfinder mode.
• rather than fiddle with the four way cursor thing, you can press the number keys to go straight where you want. I think this is standard nokia behaviour of yore but the cursor thing on the k750i is rather fiddly.

I read a moan that the shutter sound of the K750i could not be turned off for privacy reasons and I never thought to question it. Well stalkers and weirdo's out there, your luck is in, if the phone is in silent mode it doesn't click!

It would be nice for me to be able to receive email notifications about server outages etc using text messages on my K750i. In theory I could do this through my Vodafone email account which can send text messages to report new emails but in practise the vodafone email service is flakier than my servers:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

    <censored>@vodafone.net

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 9): 553 5.3.0 Sorry, but your email could not be delivered
to the intended recipient. Please check the following link for details:
http://www.vodafone.net/error.htm

The error page this refers me to lets me check if an IP address is in a blocking list. If gmail is in a blocking list then it wasn't yesterday and overnight the spammers have won and made email useless.

The 'settings' page in vodafone's web email is offline again.

Conclusion: nice phone, lousy network.

Update: Also it appears that vodafone email notification texts do not come out of the 250 texts/month tarriff allocation: I have to pay 10.2p (+vat?) for them. Forget it. There are other email->sms gateways (e.g), possibly more reliable since their business depends on them.

Also, if an email is sent from the phone via SMS, the message received is buried in an html table full of vodafone graphics. It seems to be almost totally ruined for moblogging.

Just discovered I can turn silent mode on and off just by pressing and holding the # key.

The more I use the Sony Ericsson K750i, the more I like it. The camera may not be brilliant but it is good enough, if combined with Paintshop Pro to run digital camera noise removal and One-step photo fix. What is good about it is that to take a photo you just open the lens cover and press the shutter button: this works even if the keypad was locked. Hence I was able to get this photo because the phone happened to be in my pocket when the baby did something cute:

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:
  
  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 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.