Mobile Phone Review

At the end of last year, we crowned the Sony Ericsson K800i as our phone of the year for 2006. For us it was a perfect combination of high tech features and usable design.. so when Sony Ericsson announce the SE K810i, we were pretty exciting. Surely that must be a phone that would be better than the K800i? Yes?The long and the short of it is that the Sony Ericsson K810i appears to be exactly the same as last years K800i.. there’s a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus, a Xenon flash and multishoot capabilities. The K810i is a UMTS 2100 phone with tri-band GSM support, a 2.0" QVGA display, expandable memory, a comprehensive software suite including an email client, web browser, RSS newsreader and blogging support and a whole host of really cool features.. but they seem to be exactly the same in the K810i as the older handset.

Being sad sort of techie types at Mobile Gazette, it took us a little while to look away from the specification sheet for long enough to actually examine the K810i itself and of course then it was obvious.. Sony Ericsson have changed the keypad. Well, alright, they’ve made a few cosmetic changes too.. but ultimately the most significant different that we can see is the funny little round buttons where the K800i had a conventional number pad. And the K810i  has gone a bit shiny too, as is the current fashion.

Now.. we haven’t tried the K810i’s keypad and heck, there might have been good reasons to change it.. but to us, this looks like a silly cosmetic change that might actually put off buyers. Yes, it’s quite possible that Sony Ericsson have taken the old K800i and have spoiled it.

If you can live with the strange keypad, then the Sony Ericsson K810i promises to be the same excellent camera phone as its predecessor. If you’ve got a K800i.. well, best to keep hold of it for now as Sony Ericsson are bound to have something more interesting up their sleeves for later in the year.

Sony Ericsson say that the K810i should be available from Q2 2007 in Noble Blue and Golden Ivory colour combinations. There will also be a non-3G K818c variant for China.

We had a preview of the Sony Ericsson W880i last month, and now Sony Ericsson have revealed the full technical details of this new "Walkman" phone.

The Sony Ericsson W880i is an ultra-slim and exceptionally light 3G phone at just 9.5mm thick and an astonishing 72 grams in weight. The light weight is more surprising given that the W880i has a stainless steel finish.

The display is a 1.8" 240x320 pixel TFT panel in 262,000 colour, and the W880i has a two megapixel primary camera with a secondary camera for video calls. A 1GB Memory Stick Micro card is included in the box, which by our calculations is enough for about 16 albums worth of high-quality audio. The W880i has stereo Bluetooth and an enhanced version of the Walkman player.

The W880i is a UMTS 2100 MHz 3G phone with tri-band 900/1800/1900 MHz GSM, but there’s no word of a "W880a" version for North America. The W888c is a non 3G tri-band GSM version of the W880i with the video calling camera omitted, aimed at mainland China.

Talktime on GSM is quoted as 6.5 hours with 17 days standby time and up to 20 hours of music playback. 3G use and Bluetooth will reduce the battery life, of course.

The other features on the Sony Ericsson W880i are very similar to other handsets in the current crop of "Walkman" phones - there’s a web browser, email client (with push capabilities), RSS newsreader, speakerphone, video streaming and of course a comprehensive multimedia player.

There are some compromises with the Sony Ericsson W880i though - the main one is the size of the screen. Although it’s a 240x320 pixel display, it is only 1.8", compared with the 1.9" display on the lower end W610i and display sizes of over 2.0" on many other phones.. however, the slightly smaller screen has advantages in weight and power consumption. There’s no flash on the main camera (and 3.2 megapixels would have been much nicer), and unlike some other "Walkman" phones, the W880i doesn’t have an FM radio. The other missing feature is the lack of quad-band GSM and the W880i doesn’t have EDGE support either - so this is very much aimed at UMTS 2100 users only. This is nit-picking really - if you want some of these features in a Sony Ericsson "Walkman" phone, then you have plenty of other choices available.

In terms of looks, the W880i combines Sony Ericsson’s typical understated design with a distinctly stylish finish. Combined with the ultra-slim form factor, and the W880i will clearly have plenty of "wow" factor. The W880i will come in two colour schemes of "Steel Silver" and "Flame Black".