Sony Ericsson K660i

By Joseph Hanlon, CNET.com.au
Apr 21, 2008

At the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona this year Sony Ericsson announced two new Cyber-shot branded phones and in the process changed the Cyber-shot branding prefix from K (as in K850i) to C (C902). This left us wondering if the K prefix may get recycled to mean something new. If the K660i is indicative of this change, maybe K now means phones for kids.

Design

If the lime and white color scheme didn't give away the target market for this phone then the lanyard clip at the bottom of the handset confirmed our suspicions. The K660i is a cheap-to-mid range phone designed to appeal to a youth market.

Our first impressions of the K660i were not strong. The handset is a simple looking Sony Ericsson candy-bar with a two-inch QVGA color display. Below the screen and navigation buttons are tiny circular numeric keys, each about the size of M&M minis (you know, the tiny little ones). While this isn't the most attractive keypad design we've seen, it's certainly easy to use.

At 15mm the K660i is thicker than we'd like, especially for a low-spec phone, given Sony Ericsson's previous success with super-slim styled handsets. On the left-hand side of the phone you'll find an M2 memory stick slot, which is great for hot-swapping memory, and on the bottom of the handset is the combined charging and headphone port. Sony Ericsson bundle a 256MB memory card with the handset, which is generous for a phone in this price range.

Features

It seems a cruel irony that while the K660i has HSDPA, other phones designed with Web browsing in mind don't have similarly fast data speeds (we're looking squarely at you iPhone). Call us cynics, but the only reason you put HSDPA in a phone marketed at kids is to sell music downloads.

That said, the K660i does have a few nice Web-focused features. The four keys on the right side of the numeric pad (3,6,9 and #) are browser shortcuts for bookmarks, search entry, page zooming and a shortcut to Sony Ericsson's "Fun and Downloads" site. These shortcuts definitely come in handy for speedy surfing.

The pre-installed NetFront browser is apparently Web 2.0/xHTML compatible, however our experience suggested that the K660i is only adequate for browsing mobile sites; we encountered some difficulty with page rendering on some standard sites we tried to access, and the small screen makes reading long, wide pages tiresome even when using the nifty zoom tool.

The K660i also features a 2-megapixel camera on the back, with a self-portrait mirror, but no flash or autofocus. We tested the camera outside on a beautiful, sunny day and took some very nice photos. Quick processing helps keep the focus sharp and free of movement blur, and the color reproduction was bright and true. Later in the day though, without a flash, the camera struggled to perform to the same high standard.

• Most Popular

• Upcoming

What's Hot