Peter's Blog

The mobile internet on my new phone seems much faster and more usable than it did on my old phone. The main thing that helps is that the phone goes straight to a google search page whereas on my old phone I had to wade through a load of vodafone branding. I am finding it handy to be able to google whereever I happen to be rather than have to remember to do it later.

I think the last time I used the internet on my old mobile was when I had sold my car and needed a taxi home from the wilds of Thurrock, alien territory. I went through the vodafone crap and found a search page and searched for local taxis. I got about three references, one didn't answer, another was limosine hire and the third was a bus company. I walked for miles that day.

I think (the phone doesn't make it obvious) I am using plain old WAP for browsing. I don't think any gprs is set up and I've turned off the 3G search as I have read that trying (and continually failing) to scan for a 3G network is a waste of battery power. The performance on plain old WAP is ok.

At work one of my chores is to set up the email on the managers new smartphones. That job has put me off the hassle of having one of those and the speed that the email downloads at isn't wonderful. I have installed the gmail reader on my mobile and that was much easier than trying to set up imap on a nokia. Oh, if only the company used google apps...

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

Interesting idea. Add a contact to the phone list in your mobile phone called 'ICE'. This is the number of someone you would like contacted in an emergency. If your phone is found at an accident then people can get in touch with your significant other.

More about it here.

Wife's Motorola V547 has been sent off for repair. It keeps giving 'call failures' or dropping calls. They tried resetting something in firmware at the O2 shop but this didn't fix the problem. Should take a week or two for them to fix it, which isn't bad as we have an old phone to put the SIM in.

My contract expires next month. The Samsung D500 is tempting me:

• MP3 player
• 88M memory (not great but ok for an hour or two's music)
• bluetooth (hate to think how long it would take to transfer 88M over bluetooth at 100kbps or so).
• 1M pixel camera with flash
• not a boring Nokia.