Sony Ericsson K850i Cyber-shot

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Features

The phone's menu is standard Sony Ericsson's fare with a 3 x 4 icon grid, tabbed browsing interface for Settings and vertical scrolling for other options. The touch-sensitive softkeys are mapped to the applications and they show up as different configurations when selected. There's no option to customize the softkeys in standby mode. The left key opens the media browser, whereas the middle and right ones bring you to the phone's menu and contacts folder, respectively.

Sony Ericsson is shipping its recent handsets with the new media-browsing interface that looks vaguely like the Sony PlayStation Portable. The browser doesn't bring anything new to the plate and it's just a different way of managing multimedia files on the phone. The Photo, Music, Video and Settings icons are lined in a column. To select any of the options, we had to press right using the navigation pad which brought us to the next level of options.

The K850i comes equipped with a built-in accelerometer. Again, this is nothing new since the earlier W580i already sported such a feature as a pedometer. However, the sensor on the K850i is used solely to determine the orientation of the display. When we turn the handset sideways, the screen automatically changes into landscape mode. The sensor is also used in one of the installed games: Marble Madness 3D. The mission is to navigate the marble to the end of the maze by tilting the phone to control the orb. Although there's always the traditional keypad to fall back on, the fun is in playing the game using the motion sensor controls.

On the digital imaging front, the K850i has a comprehensive set of features and is comparable with some midrange digital cameras. The user can choose different image sizes, quality settings and shooting modes. There is 16x digital zoom, though we hardly used that due to pixelation in the pictures. The K850i also comes with autofocus, a built-in Xenon flash, a second LED light (when was the last time you saw two types of flash on one device?), selectable ISO, white balance, metering modes and a variety of scene modes to help the user along. When holding the K850i sideways in camera mode, the white keypad lighting goes off as the top row of keys light up with mini blue icons which double as camera shortcuts.

Other notable goodies on this Cyber-shot include a front-facing camera for 3G video calls, FM radio with RDS, organizer functions, Track ID, Video/Photo/Music DJ, voice recorder, RSS feed reader, Web browser, Bluetooth stereo with A2DP and triband HSDPA connectivity.

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