Sony Ericsson K770 review: Cyber-shot in the middle

Ring Ring

Sony Ericsson K770 is without a doubt good at making and receiving calls. The loudspeaker is loud enough and you wouldn't miss an incoming call even in noisy surroundings. You can hear cracks in tracks with more bass at the highest volume level.

Calling our friend Dexter

Speakerphone test results

Phonebook: nothing new

The phonebook interface is simple and straightforward. Either the SIM or the phone contacts can be set as default for the phonebook. Both lists cannot be displayed simultaneously. Otherwise, you can choose to use the handy option of duplicating any new contacts that you save in the phone's memory to the SIM card. The maximum capacity of the phonebook is 1000 entries but you can save up to 2500 phone numbers - no change here. Contacts can be ordered by First or Last name. They are searchable by gradual typing of the desired name.

Contacts list • free memory status

When adding a new contact, there are five positions available for phone numbers: Mobile, Home, Work, Fax and Other. This is the first tab of fields for the new contacts. The second one is for email and web addresses. The third is for assigning a picture, a custom ringtone and a voice command. The fourth goes for Title, Company and postal address. The last, fifth tab, is for additional information and birth date. Upon adding a birth date, you're prompted to choose whether to add it to the calendar and set a reminder.

Contact details

As most other Sony Ericsson handsets, the Sony Ericsson K770 has a Voice Dialing feature. You can activate it with a longer press on the down or up volume key. In order to use it though, you would have to prerecord your voice commands in a very quiet environment.

Call management

The Calls log is divided into four different tabs. They are: All, Answered (Received), Dialed and Missed. The tabs can take up to 30 call records altogether, which are shared between the separate tabs. When there are several calls made to a single contact, only the last call gets displayed.

Calls log

Texting

All messages, except emails, use one Inbox. No matter what kind of message has been received, it goes to the common Inbox. Only email messages have their own separate Inbox. The phone also offers an RSS-feed reader, using the NetFront web browser. When typing a message, there is a character counter, which would alert you when you get close to the 160-symbol limit. The T9 dictionary goes without saying. Unfortunately, the Manage Messages and Manage Email applications found in K850 are not available here. Pity, indeed.

Messaging menu • write new • typing a SMS

Sony Ericsson K770 sounds as good as Walkman branded phone, which is a worthy achievement. A most likely explanation is that a Walkman phone's audio hardware is used in K770. The latter tangibly outperforms Nokia 7500 Prism but keeps some steps behind Apple iPod.

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The email client of Sony Ericsson K770 supports a variety of settings and encodings. Settings palette is standard and include connection type, incoming and outgoing server, download S&R, check interval, push email, encryption of the incoming and outgoing server and incoming and outgoing ports.

Reading an email • options menu • customizing mail settings

Music and Video: Seen it all

Sony Ericsson K770 music player supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, E-AAC+, WAV, WMA, M4A and MIDI file formats. It is the Walkman player version 1.0, as seen in Sony Ericsson K800 and K810 for example. In fact, most Sony Ericsson W-series handsets feature the same music player with several exceptions. The only difference between theirs and this one is that the one in K770 doesn't feature the MegaBass equalizer preset. Since Sony Ericsson K770 supports multi-tasking, the player can be set to run in the background. Sound is nice - as long you're using the player with a good headset, that is.

Music player menu • the Now playing screen • player options • equalizer options

Audio quality test

Until recently, sound quality used to be a subjective matter in our reviews. Realizing that mobile phones are evermore used as portable music players, subjective just won't do any more. That is why we at GSMArena will be including a new audio test in our reviewing routine to give you a more objective view of how the music players in all those handsets perform. So here are the results of the Sony Ericsson K770 and its graph compared to Apple iPod 5th generation and Nokia 7500 Prism.

Audio quality test results

Frequency response

Sony Ericsson K770 vs. Nokia 7500 Prism • Sony Ericsson K770 vs. Apple iPod 5G

Sony Ericsson K770 sounds as good as Walkman branded phone, which is a worthy achievement. A most likely explanation is that a Walkman phone's audio hardware is used in K770. The latter tangibly outperforms Nokia 7500 Prism but keeps some steps behind Apple iPod.

The video player of K770 is decent and videos can be watched in landscape mode. Unfortunately you cannot fast-forward, but still you can play the video in slow motion. The player can zoom in on your video up to 32x.

Playing a video: landscape mode is recommended

The integrated FM radio of the Sony Ericsson K770 has a memory for 20 preset stations and supports RDS. It comes with the proprietary TrackID feature that records several seconds from the track that's currently playing and gives you information on its name and artist.

Tuning in a station • TrackID in options menu • auto channeling