Sony Ericsson K850i Review

Sony Ericsson has a new flagship model K850i. This is a heir of serious phones like K810i and K790i, and like no other device it deserves the “brutal monoblock” definition.
If you look at a brand new device Syber-Shot from Sony Ericsson K850i, you’ll understand that this is a real flagship, a kind of severe male phone for touch fans.

Keyboard
I don’t want to play “find 10 differences from K810i”, although some similarities can be traced in the appearance of both typesetting keyboards. Unlike its predecessor, the buttons are not circular and made of metal. Buttons are square.
But the principle of location of these buttons has remained the same. There is a distance between the “squares”, so no mistakes occur while dialing numbers. The proceedings of the buttons are small, fixation is not very clear, however, no inconvenience arises.

Display and menu
K850i does not have a touch display. TFT-screen with a resolution of 240×320, caresses view of quality and natural color reproduction, ultra-fine grain (if you notice of course), high contrast. Out onto the actual settings, there is only brightness.
In the sun, just under the rays, the screen behaves properly, ie the image quality is good; the picture fades slightly, so you can work almost at any lighting. Yes, probably, under the rays of the North African sun, you have to cover up the display with a hand, but it’s not a problem.
K850i menu will be familiar to the owners of Sony Ericsson, because the principle remains the same. Bold icons, clear “image”, known from previous models.

Multimedia
Though this is a Cybershot and not a Walkman phone, K850i is one of Sony Ericsson’s flagship phones, and the K850i’s music-oriented feature set is identical to most Sony Ericsson Walkman phones. Auto-rotate of the display works in the Media suite of applications, and it’s generally fairly responsive. Video playback performance is better when auto-rotate is turned off. The display is one of the best we’ve seen on a mobile phone: extremely bright, sharp and saturated.

Media uses Sony PSP interface which is both intuitive and cool looking. The app handles photos, video and music. The FM radio with RDS has a good reception. The FM radio app can save favorite channels and play the radio in the background. K850i has Sony Ericsson’s free TrackID service that identifies songs playing on the radio or in the environment, and this feature works quite well (it requires a data connection since the track info is downloaded over the Internet using the phone’s browser).
The phone supports a wide variety of audio formats including MP3, Podcasts, Audiobooks, MP4, AAC, RealAudio (.ra, .rm), WMA, XMF, M4A, WAV and midi. Video formats include MPEG4 (MP4 with AAC or AMR audio), 3GPP, WMV (.asf, .wmv) and RealVideo 8 (.rv, .rm). The K850i supports OMA DRM 1.0 and 2.0 for copy protected music, video and Java applications.

Camera
Obviously, the 5 megapixel camera with an autofocus lens and Xenon flash is the centerpiece of the Cybershot K850i. And it didn’t disappoint us, in fact for the first release firmware, the camera was stable, and overall did an excellent job of imaging. The SE isn’t as fast as a dedicated digital camera, but it’s quite usable and you just might manage to catch a fleeting moment.
K850i can shoot photos at a maximum 2592 x 1944 resolution in 5MP mode and has a variety of lesser resolutions from 3MP down to VGA. The camera can shoot video at QVGA resolution (320 x 240) at 30 fps. The phone has a hardware slider button that you’ll use to select photo, video or playback mode. There’s a tiny camera application launcher button that turns the camera on and off as well as controlling the lens cover. When the camera app is running the entire screen becomes a viewfinder and it runs in landscape orientation.
Photo quality is excellent, with more usable data than K790i and K800i’s 3MP images and better exposure (no white haze or washed out effect which we sometimes noticed with K800i). Colors are accurate, if not sometimes understated and we couldn’t find a hint of color cast in outdoor shots. Indoor shots became overly warm as the camera didn’t compensate well enough for incandescent lighting in auto exposure mode with the flash on (turning off the flash fixed the problem). Indoor evening shots in poor light were pleasing with good blacks, but surprisingly the N95 managed a more exposed shot.

The K850i’s Xenon flash illuminates close subjects very well, but doesn’t add much ambient lighting, which means your subject will be decently exposed but awash in a sea of near blackness. For all but dark club shots and outdoor night shots, we recommend experimenting with turning the flash off – we consistently got brighter and more balanced shots while it was off. The camera uses a LED (actually 3 tiny LEDs) to illuminate the scene for focus and fires the power-hungry Xenon flash only when snapping the photo.
Should K790i owners upgrade it, based on the higher resolution camera? That depends on what you do with your photos: 3MP is really good enough for viewing on the average monitor (if you’ve got a 30″ LCD display, that’s a different story), and you won’t be able to view a 3MP image at 100%, let alone a 5MP image. But if you want to print photos, the extra pixels and sharper images are worth it. From what we can tell, the lens quality hasn’t improved.

The camera has a wealth of manual settings for ISO, white balance, flash control, auto/infinity focus, metering mode and 7 scene modes. Sony Ericsson’s BestPic feature shoots several shots with varied settings so you can choose the best one, and Photo fix lets you tweak photos you’ve taken before transferring them to a PC. The camera has 16x digital zoom, but alas no optical zoom (that’s still a rarity on camera phones). Video quality is very good with no jerkiness or blockiness. Colors are strong and accurate, even in low light, and the sound is clear.

Working with K850i
When you connect your phone via cable to the USB-port on your computer, mobile phone becomes visible as a normal flash drive, for ie it is available as a card, and built-in memory about 40 MB.
Data transfer rate floats from 75 to 60 kB / s, for example, the absence of the cable makes it easy to transfer a few tracks in MP3-format into the phone.
The battery power is enough for about two days: you can listen to music, make few shots a day and for an hour and a half use the Bluetooth-headset and talk 15-20 minutes a day. If you find yourself a more active user, then the battery life will decrease accordingly.

Conclusion
We get a very feature-rich (and not in vain) phone that can compete with brand new smart phones from top manufacturers.
Significant functional and somewhat dramatic appearance make K850i unless a bestseller, and surely one of the most cherished and sought after market mobile phones.