Sony Ericsson Shows Off Feature-Heavy Cell Phones

An anonymous reader writes "As if waiting until the end of the month for the iPhone wasn't bad enough, Sony Ericsson has announced a set of super phones due to come out later this year. The Sony Ericsson K850i features an impressive 5-megapixel camera with auto-focus and xenon flash, while the W960i comes with a whopping 8GB of on-board memory, stereo Bluetooth, 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity, and a 3.2-megapixel camera. These were among several other new devices Ericsson unveiled recently, in hopes feature-heavy offerings will put it firmly back on the camera and music phone map."

Comments

and how much battery life?

[timmarhy]

you guessed it - they are super shy about THAT detail

Re:and how much battery life?

[TheRaven64]

Not only that, but a working Bluetooth stack. The horrendously broken implementation of the File Transfer protocol on my Nokia phone makes me miss my old SE one. ObEx works, but it's push-only and the default file manager needed replacing for it to be useable.

I moved from an Ericsson t68 to a Sony Ericsson t610, and found the UI went backwards slightly. Previously, all menu items were numbered, so you could skip to the one you wanted by pressing the keypad button. With the t610, this shortcut still worked, but they weren't numbered, so you had to count the options, making it only marginally faster than using the little joystick.

Re:This is all well and good..

[Conception]

From my limited experience with them... the sony phones are the only ones who's music player actually is intuitive and works like a music player, rather than just some app they stuck on a phone. On that particular issue, I'd say they are standing on pretty good ground.

Nokia N95

[rishistar]

In terms of whats out there now the Nokia N95 has raised the bar coniderably for feature heavy handsets (though the iPhone has forced things along too, at least in the personal world). Playing leapfrog/catchup with this is a must do for all handset manafacturers wanting a share of the upper end of the market. In addition it is incredibly usable as a phone (though the focus on the camera is a bit iffy).

Re:Nokia N95

[slashflood]

You obviously never had one of the N95s in your hand. It feels like it would fall apart in a couple of weeks of normal use. The GPS "fix time" is about five minutes, so you have to stand still and hold the phone in your hand until it has the initial GPS fix - about once a day. With activated GPS, the battery life time is about two or three hours. I'd rather have an external bluetooth GPS receiver that comes with its own battery.

K850 - probably no real improvement over k800

[AaronLawrence]

The SE K800 already had the xenon flash (which is the biggest improvement to the camera, letting you take actually useful photos in darkness) and 3MP. Going to 5MP probably achieves nothing as the sensor is so small.

Re:As a K750i owner

[ocp]

There is a cover on the camera lens which is opened and closed automatically as needed.

Re:So the obvious question is...

[IamTheRealMike]

Fuck the features. Does it get good reception and decent range? Can it survive being dropped, mishandled, weather etc? Does it actually last for more than 18 months? Can I hear you properly....?

Why? I like features! But OK, here are your answers. Yes it gets decent reception and range, at least, I've never had any problems with that when my friends didn't. Can it survive being dropped/mishandled/weather etc. Well I took my W800i through the Mexican jungle, have dropped it more times than I care to think and I've had it for about two years now yet it all still works. The only part I've had to replace is the external mini-jack adapter which doesn't seem to be too robust ... if you let the cable catch on things eventually the wires inside will work loose and you'll have to buy another. The phone itself is pretty robust though.

Re:But they invite comparison...

[puto]

Well,

"closest thing to an ipod killer" cracks me up.

I would call the 3.2 megapixel camera,(iphone does not have) 3G(iphone does not have). All killing the iphone right there. Should not have been released without 3g, but hey second generation you can give apple another 700 bucks for technology that every other phone has now.

Puto