Sony Ericsson K800i review

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7.9

very good

Average user rating from 31 users

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Sony Ericsson K800i user reviews

February 12, 2007

Posted by: Chris Ze

"Not that good, really"

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What I don't like:

MENU, MENU, MENU

Review:

Sony Ericsson K800i: Far from being a "perfect" phone!

10 good reasons for NOT buying it!

I have owned a (Vodafone branded) Sony Ericsson K800i for about 4 months.

As a phone might be OK but its menu (typical Sony Ericsson) is far from being perfect. I use the phone daily and I have found some annoyances. Just think about them before buying it to make sure they suit yourself.

These little "annoyances" could probably upset you or can make your daily living with the phone a bit frustrating!

Sometimes the phone's functioning gives me the impression that the people who designed it have never used or tried the phone afterwards! This explains why Nokia phones simply rule the market!

Let's see now what these "annoyances" (or "good reasons of NOT buying it") are:

1) The Calendar reminder tone is very short, poor, weak, hardly audible and cannot be changed (either as a tone or volume). 99.9% you will miss the time when the reminder goes off, and 99.9% you will miss that important meeting or task you have set the phone to remind you about.

2) The Sony PC Suite is a worthless, primitive and useless program. I am surprised why SE insists on distributing it (especially if you compare it to other vendors' PC suites, e.g. Nokia). It does not give you even the possibility to backup your SIM/phone contacts in a file on your PC. It can only transfer your contacts to Outlook. But even if you use Outlook Sync to do that, the program has a lot of bugs and it will surely miss some of your phone numbers, i.e. some of your numbers won't download/upload correctly. This has happened to me. I have >500 contacts with each one having more than 2 phone numbers stored in it. The program only transfers most of the time only 2 of the phone numbers (under the same contact. The 3rd and 4th numbers are lost and you have to type them manually!. You have to use 3rd party programs (i.e. MyPhoneExplorer) to do it correctly and safely. I am surprised as to why a SE person had had not noticed this! ARE THEY USING THEIR PHONES?

3) The "image stabiliser" in the camera works only with the "landscape" and "twilight landscape" scenes. All other camera scenes do not support the image stabiliser!

4) In each contact you can store up to 5 numbers (mobile, home, work, fax, other), but IT DOES NOT give you the possibility to name more than one number under the same type, e.g. to have 3 mobiles, or 2 home, etc.

5) When composing an SMS, it does not countdown (from 160) the remaining characters. Only when you reach 140 characters it starts counting down the remaining characters.

6) It does not store delivery reports on SMS. You have to go to the "status" of the message to check if it has been delivered. There is however a pop-up screen that the message has been delivered. But it does not store this message delivery report. You have to check one by one the status of each sent message to see if it has been delivered or not.

7) Fast dialling needs the pressing of 2 buttons (one for the keypad number and one for the "call"), i.e. you cannot press-and-hold a keypad number to make a fast-dialling call.

8) The keypad is very, very stiff and it needs hard and accurate pressure on each button. The buttons are not well spaced and they are very close together. You cannot type very fast. If you try to type fast then you will surely make a lot of mistakes by typing the wrong keys! At night (or day), you can hardly identify or distinguish the keypad buttons by just touching at them while not looking at them. You have to always look at them to avoid typing errors!

9) The video quality is awful. This is because the phone does not have a graphics card. Do not bother at all about the video feature. It's not worth it!

10) No option to change the ISO setting in the camera. Picture quality at night is poor. The camera raises automatically to ISO 400 in all night pictures producing very noisy images. And there is no way to change the ISO.