Sony Ericsson K300 review: Summer hit

Organize your time

Phone's options for time organizing are really basic and will hardly surprise anyone nowadays. Besides the simple (and non-changed - as usual) calendar, K300 offers an event organizer, a notebook, an alarm clock, a countdown timer, a stopwatch and a calculator.

Extras menu is relatively rich

Although the events placed into the calendar are not possible to repeat, they can be saved for unlimited period of time and, what's more, the notice of the given event can get started any time before the event itself; tasks can be assigned to individual days; tasks that have been done are marked by a change in the intro pictogram. As for the "notebook", it uses the SMS editor for creating its own messages, which, by the way, are no different from the common ones, except for the fact that they are saved into the phone's internal memory.

Month and week view of the calendar • event organizer

There are two available alarm clocks. The first one is a normal one; the second one has a repeating function; both are however independent. They share the one and only melody.

Java sprinter

What is really surprising about Sony Ericsson K300 is the extreme speed, with which it manages the applications created in the mobile Java. When tested with jBenchmark 1.0 | 2.0 it performed the stunning result of 3773 | 175, which sends it among the first top ten java mobile phones. None of us really expected such an excellent performance from a device of the class given. What's more, this mobile's Java application is accompanied by the 3D technology Mascot Capsule Engine Micro3D Edition, which is meant to fasten the creating of tri-dimensional games and their playing process. Regretfully, the two games delivered with the phone are not able to perform that many tri-dimensional juggles, so that one can make a full use of this technology.

The phone has two preinstalled games

Data transfers are possible thanks to the data support managed through GPRS; the latter is, however, of the surprisingly low class 8. It is true that you will hardly notice the difference if you use the mobile WAP of the phone; yet, if you plan to use Sony Ericsson K300 as a mobile modem for a common connection of your computer to internet, the drop in speed will become more sensible.

No matter how, it just takes pictures

The maximum picture size is priori given by the physic resolution of the sensor, which is of 640 × 480 pixels. Nevertheless, the phone can take pictures in a megapixel resolution as well; it reaches the desired resolution of 1 280 × 960 pixels by making a software interpolation. As a result, the details in such "ala megapixel" image are almost invisible, which makes me think that majority of all users will hardly ever take this kind of pictures.

Camera's viewfinder • camera menu • choosing a frame for your photo

Anyway, pictures taken in the standard VGA resolution are very good. Besides the resolution types already mentioned, you can choose between two more; there are also two quality levels available for the pictures. It takes three seconds to save a picture in a resolution of 640 × 480 pixels, and about 8 seconds to save one in the megapixel format. Due to the built-in effects, one can take black and white, reversed and sepia shaded pictures; a solar effect is also available. Pictures can be additionally decorated by different frame types. To make things complete, we should also add that the phone has 4x digital zoom and is also able to shoot video of an average quality.

Sample photos

The summer hit

Sony Ericsson K300 is equipped with enough functions and options to satisfy the majority of the mobile phone users. The only weak aspect of its functional equipment is the small capacity of the phonebook. As for its size and weight, the phone is cutely small and comfortable. Phone's outlook is simple, but also elegant; the quality of the display is sufficient, controlling is relatively comfortable. If we add the reasonable price, that does not exceed 170 euros, there is no doubt the new Sony Ericsson model has extremely high chances to become the hit of the oncoming summer.