Sony Ericsson K810 review: A Cyber-shot is reborn

Phonebook: numbers come close

The phonebook interface is simple and easy to use. You can choose whether the SIM contacts or the phone contacts should be the default for the phonebook. Both lists cannot be displayed simultaneously. Otherwise, a nice option is that you can make the phone to autosave to the SIM card any new contacts that you save in the phone's memory. The maximum capacity of the phonebook is 1000 contacts but you can save up to 2500 phone numbers. Contacts can be ordered by First or Last name. They are searched by gradual typing of the desired name.

Contacts list • Free memory status

When adding a new contact, there are five possibilities for the phone number: 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 and a custom ringtone. The fourth goes for Title, Company, Street, City, State, ZIP, Country information. The last, fifth tab, is for additional information and birth date. When you add the birth date, the phone asks you whether you would like to add it to the calendar and put down a reminder for it.

Contact details

Call management

The Calls log is divided in four different tabs. They are: All, Answered (Received), Dialed and Missed. The tabs altogether contain up to 30 call records, which are shared between the separate tabs.

Calls log

No news about messaging either

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 a RSS feeds reader that in fact uses the NetFront web browser. When writing a message, there is a character counter, which activates when you reach 20 characters before the 160 limit. Of course, there is the T9 dictionary to assist the typing.

Messaging menu • Write new • typing a SMS •reading an email

Sound is always exciting with Sony Ericsson

Sony Ericsson K810 music player supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, E-AAC+, WAV, WMA, M4A and MIDI file formats. It is nothing special and looks just as your regular Sony Ericsson Walkman player used in the W-series of the Swedish manufacturer. The only difference is that it doesn't feature the MegaBass equalizer preset. Since Sony Ericsson K810 supports multi-tasking, the player can be set to run in background. Sound is nice - given you use the player with a nice headset, of course.

Music player menu • The Now playing screen • player options

The video player of K810 is nice and offers the option to watch videos in landscape mode.

Playing a video: portrait and landscape modes

The integrated FM radio of the Sony Ericsson K810 has a memory for 20 preset stations and supports RDS.

Tuning in a station

The maximum capacity of the phonebook is 1000 contacts but you can save up to 2500 phone numbers. Contacts can be ordered by First or Last name. They are searched by gradual typing of the desired name.

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Pictures don't come second either

There is nothing new in the file browser department as well. 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 files shown. The integrated memory of the K810 is 64MB. There is also a Memory Stick Micro M2 memory card slot. The size of the memory card shipped in the retail package should be 128MB which is far too insufficient for a 3 megapixel cameraphone.

The phone memory tab • available memory space

Browsing your pictures is as easy as ever - you could do that in a list view with or without thumbnails. You can also view your pictures as a thumbnail grid of 3 x 3 or 5 x 5. The video files can also be browsed as thumbnails. If you highlight a video thumbnail it starts playing as a preview.

List view • thumbnails list view • 3 x 3 grid view• 2 x 2 grid view

The interesting 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 even choose the exact date. That sort of image filtering is offered by computer picture browsers and digital cameras. The Timeline sorting is seen more and more often lately in the recent Sony Ericsson phones.

Browsing March pictures • browsing pictures made on 3rd of March

You can view the pictures themselves vertically (in portrait mode) just as you would on any other phone or horizontally (in landscape mode) if you prefer. When viewing the pictures one by one the phone preloads a lower quality preview in order to allow you fast browsing. Once you find a picture, you would like to see in its full glory you should stop browsing for a second and the phone would load it with its normal quality.

Viewing the pictures in landscape mode is much more natural

You can zoom in to the actual size of the picture or even more, up to 32x. Given the available megapixel count zooming further than 8x doesn't really reveal more details but produces only smudged spots.

Zooming in: 2x; 8x; 32x

While browsing pictures you can easily do a little bit of editing on them or send them as MMS and email or via Bluetooth and Infrared. If you intend to do detailed editing of the picture, the PhotoDJ application is at your disposal. With its help you can easily adjust levels, light balance, brightness and contrast, remove unwanted red-eye effect, apply some color effects to the picture such as negative and sepia, or you can add a frame or a text to the picture. We are pleased with its capabilities - it does great with removing red eyes without spoiling the whole picture.

Some of the available PhotoDJ editing options