First Impression

The Sony Ericsson K810i camera phone has kept some similarities to its original the K800i in terms of overall looks and features. One major difference to the k800i though, is the keypad. The phone now has 4mm wide disc shaped buttons, which were easy to use, however some people might find it hard to adapt to due to their small size. The phone has a rubbery soft feel on the back, and the front is shiny. In between each line of vertical buttons there is a large space. This phone is slimmer and lighter than its original weighting at just 103 grams.

Camera Test

The cyber-shot camera is excellent. It has a 16X digital zoom, and has loads of features that allow you to take photos with different themes, effects, and background frames. The quality of the photos is very good, and there are several different capture modes, including sports, which allow brilliant quality photos for fast moving objects, and beach/snow mode is for when the surroundings are very bright. There is also a new feature called “photofix” where a picture can be adjusted after it’s been taken to give it a professional look.

The camera also has four different picture sizes to choose from. The only setback from the camera is the shutter speed in which the photo is taken, as it is quite slow. However the camera does have a burst mode called ‘Bestpics’, and this allows 9 pictures to be automatically taken one after the other straight away.

One of the things I found annoying was when looking through all the pictures in the photo album. When a picture is chosen, it initially looks blurred and distorted. After about a second the picture clears up and looks normal, but sometimes it can take longer than a second. This can be irritating when trying to have a quick browse through photos.

The camera is very easy to use on this mobile phone due to its shortcuts. As when the camera function is on, the buttons on the left hand side of the keypad give you direct access to all of the camera and video settings. These buttons have icons which are lit up in blue to show you what they are for. Also at the top of the screen there are two photo album shortcut buttons, one takes you to the camera album and the other takes you to the last picture taken with the camera.

The video camera is just of an average standard, as when used on the automatic mode the picture can look quite fuzzy and pixelated at times. This is the same when using 3G video call.

Music Test

There are lots of features on this phone music wise. A new service that has been added to the phone which the Sony Ericsson k800i did not have is TrackID. This is a music recognition service that is free, it identifies songs that are played from a external music source such as an FM radio. This service is quick and it is able to collect the song, artist and album name. The phone has a FM radio and a media music player, which separates the songs saved into Artists and Track categories. Playlists can also be created to gather all your favourite songs together.

As well as the music player there is also Music DJ, which allows you to create your own song using four different instruments. The Playnow service also allows you to download your favourite songs. When music is played on this phone it is clear and of good quality, this is the same when listening to music through the headphones. Music can also be listened to through a wireless Bluetooth headset. All in all a great music phone.

Living with it

Living with this phone for two weeks was good in general. One of the main things that I liked about this phone was the FaceWarp software. It’s the most amusing thing on a phone ever! The most annoying thing about this phone is the signal interference noise. This noise is when the phone is polling to the network. It happens when the phone is near computer speakers, a Hi-Fi, or a car’s radio, and it is by far the worst signal noise from a phone that I have used. The phone has great battery life as I barely had to charge it even though it was always being used. A great function is that a video clip can be stored with each contact on the phone. This means that when someone calls the video will be played along with the videos noise. Texting on this phone was simple, and once you have got used to the small buttons, it becomes very rare to accidentally press the wrong button, as the buttons are quite well separated.

Conclusion

In general I think that this phone is a good basic mobile phone. It’s simple to use, and as well as having a few extras it has all the essential things anyone would need. This was the first Sony Ericsson mobile I have used, and the impression that I got was that it seems like a practical and reliable handset. It has lots of fun and entertaining stuff to do, such as Music and Photo DJ and FaceWarp. This is a cybershot camera and it does have everything you would expect from a digital camera, as there are lots of things to do with the camera and pictures.

Technical Specs 

Dimensions
106 x 48 x 17 mm

Weight
115 g

Main Display
TFT, 256K colours
320 x 240 pixels

Digital Camera
3.2 Megapixel
2048 x 1536 pixels
Video

Memory
64 MB internal memory
Memory Stick Micro (M2)

Battery
up to 10 hrs talktime
up to 400 hrs standby

Features
Bluetooth
Email client
GPRS
Java
mini USB port
MMS
MP3 ringtones
MP3/AAC/AAC+ player
Quad band
Speaker phone
WAP 2.0 / XHTML