Sony Ericsson K850i review

Sony Ericsson's K800i was the first phone we reviewed that took photos good enough to print. The K800i had a 3.2-megapixel sensor, but the K850i comes with a digital camera-rivalling 5-megapixel sensor.

Like the K800i, the K850i is half phone, half camera, but has a much neater design. The phone is much slimmer, and there's no unsightly bulge on the back. Instead of the K800i's manual lens cover, the K850i has a cover that slides open automatically when you want to take a photo. Both the cover and the lens are protected by a clear plastic cover that tends to attract fingerprints, so you'll need to carry a lens-cleaning cloth if you don't want smeary photos. The entire case is made of shiny plastic, which looks great but quickly becomes covered in finger marks and isn't especially comfortable to hold.

To take a photo you turn the phone on its side and hold down the camera's power button. Just like a digital camera, the phone has a slide switch to select photo, video or playback mode, and the camera starts up quickly. The camera has an autofocus lens and a xenon flash, so unlike most camera phones, it can cope with low light conditions. Daylight photos were generally excellent, with accurate colours and negligible noise, although sunlit areas could be overexposed. The phone lets you adjust exposure to compensate, and the vibrant 240x320 resolution screen provides reasonably accurate previews of your shots.

To capture action shots you can also use the BestPic mode, which takes several photos very quickly and lets you pick the best one. Unfortunately, the lens cover on our review model refused to open after a couple of days, and not even a master reset fixed the problem.

As a phone, the K850i is less successful. Instead of a directional keypad with a central selection button and a couple of soft keys under the screen, the K850i has four plastic ridges around the '2' and '5' keys and three touch-sensitive buttons pressed up against the bottom of the screen, which effectively turn the bottom of the display into a touchscreen. You press on the ridges to navigate menus and use the touch-sensitive buttons to select items. The problem is that there's another set of buttons under the touch-sensitive buttons, and as the touch-sensitive buttons are quite hard to see, we were often confused about what to press at any one time. The tiny number keys are widely spaced, and while this makes it harder to press the wrong key, moving your thumb across such long distances makes texting tiring.

Sony Ericsson's K850i has an excellent camera, but even after a few days' use the menu system was still confusing and the keyboard and directional keypad are uncomfortable to use.