29 July 2005 10:18 am
I feel the tech channel has almost been neglected of late although to be honest, it never was going to be one of our major channels. Still being a crowd of nerds we had to have some kind of creative outlet to show off our new gear and provide excuses for why we messed around with gadgets all day.
Today's gadget happens to be the Sony Ericsson k700i phone which although isn't new nor top of the line anymore, it is still up there at the high end. Considering the price jump you really need to consider where the k750i is worth it even if you are just buying for all the fancy features as I do.
To do a quick rundown of the features it supports all kind of crazy ring tones, calendar, calculator, modem, games, downloads, MMS, colour screen, wallpaper, built in camera and video camera, flash, zoom, infrared, Bluetooth, e-mail, radio and MP3 player.
It's a small phone especially considering the size of the screen and the entire thing is lit up so even in the dark you can still see the keys and the screen provides quite a powerful light. This turns off pretty quickly though to save power which although the whole power saving thing is good it can get a little annoying when you're trying to read the screen and not actually pressing anything.
Obviously it also has a standby mood which it will switch itself onto when your not doing anything and don't have anything open. It's great to not have to turn it off but when it does go onto standby there is no way to tell that it is on other than activating it again.
The controls are easy enough to get used to, you have your normal keys then above that you have a set of four buttons and a joystick for navigating around. These are easy enough to get used to although the joystick is sensitive so it takes you a while to be able to use it without knocking it the wrong way and activating something else.
The phone itself is easy enough to navigate around. From the main screen you can go to the menu and here you are presented with a load of icons for each section such as messaging, camera, settings, address book, etc. It's all fairly intuitive once you understand the controls.
All the ring tones that come preloaded suck but that is true with almost any phone. Plus under entertainment you can find a Music DJ program which allows you to compose tunes Dance eJay style and these appear in your ring tones list once you have saved any compositions.
It also comes with a media player which is less than useful however. It just seems to list the audio files that came bundled with it; any other stuff I added to the phone isn't on the list of things to play. There is probably a way to access it but this is first impressions – if it isn't obvious, it isn't getting mentioned. Although to be honest, your better using the file manager as a media player.
The camera is easy enough to work and doesn't produce ultra high quality pictures which is the way it should be – the latest photos are quickly catching up with my digital camera and I am not happy about it.
Finally battery life could be better. The claimed talk time is about six hours although I'm guessing this doesn't include playing non-stop darts and randomly messing about with the features. Whatever it is though I only charged it up a day or two ago and it's already going flat. You can't really test battery life in the space of less than a week though.
Overall it's a pretty cool phone. Even the stuff that annoys me there are options to change so Sony usually do a pretty good job of making technology that doesn't fall apart after a few weeks of use in the real world so, so far so good.
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