Peter's Blog

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.

Phone contract has expired so I have a few alternatives to consider:

1. keep Nokia 6610i, change to pay-as-you-go, save £16 a month - calls
2. keep Nokia, stick on 25 mins/month for £16
3. Change to Vodafone, get Sony Ericsson K750i with 2M Pixel camera, MP3 player, bluetooth, you name it for £20 a month, 125 minutes, 250 texts, evening/weekend calls 1hr for price of 3 minutes. This is an internet deal, beats anything I could get on the highstreet
4. Try to wangle Blackberry 7100. This has a better keyboard for text entry.

While waiting for Wife to shop yesterday I decided that what I want most from new phone is note-taking/blogging features. The K750i has a regular keyboard so typing likely to be slow, even with predictive text. The Blackberry has more keys and two letters per key so it's predictions are likely to be better. My nokia doesn't learn from it's mistakes, every time I type "I'm home" it takes it as "I'm good" which while true is not my intended message so I have to press the button to correct it. Wife's Motoroal V547 (which is off for repair again, three failed repair attempts O2 will replace it) would learn the preference for 'home' over 'good'.

Then again, the K750i has a very good camera (for a phone) and the Blackberry doesn't have one. K750i plays MP3's but I'm not sure I'd ever listen to them.

I'm leaning towards K750i, on the hope that the predictive text is a bit better than the nokia and that I can always write in a markup language and have a script at the server end expand the markup.

I'll do some more K750i research.

BTW, I'd rather have the SE W800i, the 'Walkman Phone' which is similar to the K750i but more refined as a music player. These have only just come out, are much sought after, are more expensive and bright orange.

Update: ordered K750i. Too good a deal.

Got Motorola V547 back from 'repair' but it still keeps disconnecting during calls or fails to dial with a 'call failure'. As the problem is intermittent there is little hope in convincing O2 or their repairers that the phone has a problem so we have given up and she has gone back to a Nokia 6610. No camera!

The v547 isn't totally useless: it still reminds her to take her pill every day.

My wife has had her phone for a year so down to the O2 shop for an upgrade. She fancied a change from Nokia and liked the colour of the Motorola V600 but unfortunately that is discontinued, it has been replaced by the V547 so I got her one of those. For free . It has:

• Clamshell design
• Bluetooth
• Big clear screen
• Camera: slightly better than nokia cameras (e.g. my 6610i, wife's old 7250i) don't look quite so much like they were taken through the bottom of a dirty jam jar. Still no match for a digital camera.
• MP3 ringtones! Cool, was able to download the crazy frog which has everyone in stitches.
• Good build quality
• The keyboard has a nicer feel than the Nokias which are a bit cheap and clicky.
• The UI is rather like my late lamented Sony-ericsson T68i: fiddly and annoying.
• Good predictive text: it quickly learns that you want to type 'am home' more often than 'an good'.

With the free phone I got 25% off a Jabra BT200 FreeSpeak Bluetooth Headset and a car charger for £5.

The Jabra headset Just Worked with the phone and it is indeed cool. My wife was delighted with it, she wants me to ring her whenever she goes out so she can pose with it. I set it up to voice dial and told her she can leave the phone in her handbag.

I wanted to try the headset with Skype so I tried reinstalling my existing bluetooth USB dongles:

Smart Modular Technologies

I downloaded their latest blueopal drivers and installed them. On first installation the Audio drivers and some other bits failed to install. It did manage to install an OBEX network driver and I was able to copy files to and from the phone. This is how I installed the crazy frog .mp3 file which I downloaded above. (Am I missing something? Was I supposed to pay for it?). I tried reinstalling the blueopal drivers to get headset support and was rewarded with my first every BSOD under windows XP. The setup program kept trying to reinstall, giving more BSOD's so I had to uninstall it manually by deleting files and picking the nasty bits out of the registry by hand.

MicroStar International (MSI) dongle

Luckily I had an MSI dongle as well. I downloaded the latest SP1 drivers for this (carefully avoiding the XP SP2 version that uses the new Microsoft USB stack but that not support a headset, not until MS get into the VOIP business) and installed them with no problems.

The headset gives new microphone and audio devices so I redirected everything to the headset and again it Just Worked. Skype worked ok and talking to someone in the same room you can hear a delay of about a second between them speaking and it coming through the headset. Ragarding range, the MSI dongle is supposed to have a 100m range and with the laptop downstairs the headset can receive anywhere in the house, although at the furthest reaches the sound gets a bit choppy. I won't try Skype over Wifi, my Wifi is too flaky.

Peter's vision of the future (well maybe not that visionary):

• full mp3 players in cell phones. If an iPod shuffle is the size of a stick of gum, why not make the cell phone a little bit bigger for a 500M flash memory chip?
• death of land line phones, ripped apart by mobile phones and VOIP.
• Nokia had better pull their fingers out, the V547 makes the Nokia phones look very dull.

My phone contract was up for renewal after 12 months so I looked into my options. I ended up changing tariff to one that will cost me £16 a month instead of £30, I got a new nokia 6610i for £19.99 and I keep my year old 6610 as a spare. Over the next year I save £150 and I have a new phone. How do they make money on mobiles? New phone has a crappy camera but that's better than no camera.

I am a nokia loyalist: I had a Sony-Ericson T68i for a while but it had very poor reception and was very slow to use. I gave it to someone else and, embarassingly, it stopped working due to a generic problem that they moan about on the online forums.

Other savings:

• £9 for a 16" fan

• One-for-all 4 for £10

• 4 Lith-ion rechargable AAA batteries for £3

At dixons 1/2 price closing down sale.

One-for-all works fine with Sky+ and means just one remote by the bed. Ergonomically it is awful.

Got Nokia 7250i for wife. £35 a month for 250 minutes cross network any time. It's on O2 so reception at home should be much better than T mobile.