Sony Ericsson K800 review: Digicam in disguise

Good as it used to be

Messaging offers no improvements over the other already well-known Sony Ericsson models. The messages and emails are stored in the phone's memory with the exception of emails which also could be stored on the memory card. The My Friends chat service is also present here but that is network dependent. The only new thing here is the new set of emoticons which are quite amusing and lively.

The phone supports SMS, MMS, and email and more importantly RSS feeds. The RSS feeds support is nicely implemented. You can update the individual feeds one by one or as a whole. The feeds themselves are viewed in the NetFront web browser.

The MMS options are as good as always especially when you have nice applications such as the Video DJ which allows you to let your creative spirits soar high in the skies and literally create your own videos or video messages.

The email client is also pretty decent for a phone without OS like Symbian or Windows Mobile. It supports POP3 and SMTP and allows for entering a separate password for the SMTP server. There is no fixed limit for the email attachments size.

The email client • Email inbox • Creating and reading an email message

Of course, the sending of all messages is carried out in the background. We have always liked the Recent Recipients list that Sony Ericsson phones offer when sending a message. It really saves time and we would like to see that feature more often in mobile phones of other manufacturers.

Browse…

If you have used other Sony Ericsson handsets you won't be surprised by the K800 file manager because there are no significant improvements here. On the other hand if you are still new to SE phones, well let me tell you that they have one of the best non-OS file managers. It allows you to mark files (single or multiple), copy them, move them, and also create and delete folders as you please. There are three tabs of file lists - one for the phone memory files, one for the memory stick files and one mutual for all files. By selecting a given tab you can filter the file list you wish to see.

File browser: All files tab, Memory Stick tab, Phone memory tab

Browsing your pictures is as easy as ever - you could do that as a list with or without thumbnails where the file names are visible. You can also choose to view your pictures as a grid matrix of thumbnails in 3 x 3 or 5 x 5 grids with no file names visible. The video files can also be browsed as thumbnails. You can view the pictures themselves vertically just as you would on a normal phone or horizontally. The horizontal viewing allows for more details since most of the pictures are shot in a landscape aspect ratio which is best viewed in landscape mode. When viewing the pictures one by one the phone shows a rough preview and preloads the images in order to allow you fast browsing. By saying rough preview we mean that it displays them with a much lower quality than normally. Once you find a picture you would like to see in its full glory you should stop browsing for a couple of seconds and the phone would load it with its normal quality. Zooming in to the actual size of the picture or more is also available of course. We were pleasantly surprised by the speed you can scroll the zoomed in image horizontally or vertically.

Browsing pictures in portrait and landscape mode • Browsing pictures one by one and zooming in

The new thing about the file browser is the Timeline view which allows you to filter the pictures according to the month they have been taken in. After you specify the month, you could choose even the exact date. It's that sort of image filtering that is offered by computer picture browsers.

You can even print your images directly from the phone since it supports the Pictbridge and DPOF interfaces.

The music player in fact is directly copied from the Walkman phones series - it's just been stripped of any Walkman branding and there's no MegaBass equalizer preset. We suppose you are already aware that it's one of the best in the business.

The Music player

We think that this is the best place to mention the FM radio capabilities of the phone. Of course, the radio works only when the earphones are plugged in since those are used as an antenna. Again, it's the usual Sony Ericsson radio with RDS support and 20 stations memory. It has the same quality as the radio seen in K750. A cool innovation is the implementation of the Identify Music feature. If you happen to hear a song on the radio that you really like, you could start the Identify Music and it will record a few seconds from the song, upload it to a server and get the Artists and Songs names. This feature is going to be seen in all new Sony Ericsson models that have FM Radio capabilities.