My new cellphone: the SE k750i
After many months of drooling and envying the users of this particular cellphone, that was many times voted the best camera for these devices, I finally decided to acquire one. Well, it didn’t actually come as a decision, but as more of an opportunity to purchase one for a very attractive price, and carrying only 3 months of use.
When I received it I quickly inserted my SIM card and tried it on, and my first impression wasn’t very good. The phone software was horribly slow and it kept on restarting with a white screen randomly. After trying many things, such as resetting the phone’s settings and deleting files, I gave up on it, and decided to order a USB cable in order to do the firmware update, hoping it would fix the problem.
But then I had the idea of trying the phone with another SIM card, in this case my father’s, and when I did it seemed like the phone was breathing a new life and then I truly understand how great it was. I exchanged my SIM card for a newer model and started using and loving every second of it.
My previous phone, the Nokia 6230, had many things that I had grown accustomed to, like the quick dial, the four options you could quickly choose by using the 4 navigation keys: camera, calendar, contacts and SMS. After a bit of fiddling around with the options, I discovered that I could set the same 4 shortcuts on the joystick, but with a small difference, that I could choose *ANY* program/menu/folder as the shortcut.
After even further use, I discovered that I could do everything that I did before on the Nokia, with the difference that everything seemed a little better. Things that annoyed me before, like being unable to delete all SMS’es when I didn’t feel like filtering them are passive and easy to do with the Sony Ericsson. And having owned an older SE model, the T610, I can clearly tell the differences and improvements made. It feels like what Mac users must have felt when their interface and OS was made into what it is today.
With my Nokia, even though I did and still do like it a lot the software like it was built around their very old software from the days of the 3210 with very few slight differences (some color, images, camera software). Compatibility wise, I think that SE phones are *the* ones of choice. They work perfectly and equally well with Windows, Linux or MacOS X and you can even use the phone as a remote for your default Media Player (WMP in the case of Windows and iTunes/FrontRow in the case of Mac) with no fiddling around with settings at all (except for giving permission to your phone to do so). You can also control presentation programs, such as Powerpoint and even the Mouse Cursor.
The camera surpassed my expectations in some aspects and in others it was what I expected. It isn’t, by far, a substitute for any digital camera. Even Sony’s cheapest models can surely take better pictures than the k750i, but I’m not necessarily saying that it has a bad camera, it actually falls very little behind compared to my Sony T3 camera in some test shots I did (and I’m talking about a “full fledged” digital camera opposed to a camera phone).
Your flash is limited, night pictures are difficult (but not impossible) to take with good results and you must apply many Photo-shooting skills in order to achieve good results (do a quick search for k750i on Flickr and you’ll be surprised at the quality of the pictures you’ll find there).
The screen is wonderfully well lit and has excellent detail. When I was reading reviews, I feared that the screen would be similar to my old T610, in other words, impossible to view under sunlight, bad color interpretation, “blurred” text. I’m happy to say that I found none of those defects on the phone. I’m not saying the screen has the quality of my PSP’s, but I guess it’s the same, if not better quality of the Gameboy Micro, or the quality found on the most modern Nokias (the N series).
If you were thinking of buying this cellphone, I can guarantee you you won’t be sorry. And if you’re worried about the difficulty of migrating from Nokia to SE, you won’t find many barriers for getting used to it. I won’t list all the good features of the menus I like, but if you ever felt like your phone should have had an extra option, this phone probably has it. It’s software is very complete (feature wise).
If you enjoy gaming on the cellphone you’ll find this phone very nice for that purpose. I don’t know what’s the “best” gaming cellphone (the N-Gage perhaps?) but this cellphone can handle pretty similar graphics. I currently have Ridge Racer (yes, 3D), a “mobile” version of Virtua Tennis by Sega, and Sonic the Hedgehog 1. And I love all of them!
The only things I found inferior to the Nokia are the network coverage (it’s slightly worse that the Nokia’s) and the speaker is slightly lower. So if you have trouble listening to your phone ringing you might find that this phone is not good for you.
[tags]Sony Ericsson, k750i, cellphone review, k750i review, k750i camera[/tags]
