Sony Ericsson K850i
Discontinued 15th June 2007
On paper the Sony Ericsson K850i looks
like a winner - this latest Cyber-shot branded handset
now has a 5 megapixel camera and boasts HSDPA 3.5G data
plus tri-band UMTS support, plus a host of other goodies.
However, Sony Ericsson have made some
compromises along the way and perhaps the K850i suffers
because of this.
First the good stuff - the Sony Ericsson
K850i's camera comes with autofocus, a flash, multishot
capabilities, an image stabilizer and various photo
tweaking applications. The display is a 240x320 pixel
panel in 262,000 colours, and the K850i has a multimedia
player, radio, expandable memory (using Memory Stick
Micro cards), stereo Bluetooth, a web browser, email
client and RSS news reader.
But
then there are a few catches. One of them is the K850's
video capture capabilities.. although it can capture
video clips at a 320x240 pixel resolution at 30 frames
per second, this is significantly below the 640x480
pixel capabilities of the Nokia
N95.
And then there's the keypad - Sony Ericsson
have introduced a quite different arrangement for the
K850i - although it's slightly less cluttered than
the K810i,
it doesn't appear to be as easy to use and it looks
a little odd.
The K850i is being pitched as a business
phone as well as a consumer handset - it supports Microsoft
ActiveSync to enable email and PIM functions to be synchronised
with an Exchange server. Tri-band 3G support with HSDPA
also means that the K850i can be used on pretty much
any WCDMA 3G network worldwide, although oddly it is
only a tri-band GSM 900/1800/1900 MHz device and not
a quad-band one.
The Sony Ericsson K850i measures 102
x 48 x 17mm and weighs 118 grams. The battery life is
not known at the time of going to press. There are two
colour variants: "Velvet Blue" and "Luminous
Green", although this colouring extends pretty
much only as far as the controller pad and some piping
down the side of the phone. The phone is slated for
release some time during Q4 2007. There is also a K858c
variant for China which loses 3G support and substitutes
EDGE data instead.
Really the Sony Ericsson K850i should
be considered an evolutionary step up from the excellent
K800
and K810i
phones. It's a little disappointing to see that Sony
Ericsson couldn't come up with a competitor to the Nokia
N95 with their first 5 megapixel device, but we suspect
that it won't be long until they do.
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Sony
Ericsson K850i at a glance
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Available:
|
Q4
2007
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Network:
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GSM
900/1800/1900 + UMTS 850/1900/2100
|
Data:
|
GPRS
+ UMTS (3G)
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Screen:
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240x320
pixels, 262k colours
|
Camera:
|
5
megapixels
|
Size:
|
Medium
monoblock 102 x 48 x
17mm / 118 grams
|
Bluetooth:
|
Yes
|
Memory
card:
|
Memory
Stick Micro
|
Infra-red:
|
No
|
Polyphonic:
|
Yes
|
Java:
|
Yes
|
Battery
life:
|
Not
specified
|
|
|