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Sony Ericsson K750i

The best multimedia handset yet?

Review It seems that Sony Ericsson has been hard at work on their latest batch of handsets, recently announcing no fewer than seven new models. Always the chameleon, Sony Ericsson seems to have perfected the art of squeezing the same technology into suitably different shells, so that four of the handsets being cat-walked were in fact two different chassis with two sets of bodywork on each, writes Charlie Brewer.

Sony Ericsson K750iThe K750i and D750i are effectively the same phone with the 'K' being the unbranded original and the 'D' a bespoke version for T-mobile UK. To be clear from the outset, besides a slight difference to the shape of the keys and a variation on a theme for the lens cover, the handsets are identical. The D750i naturally carries T-Mobile's trademark user interface, with a white background to reflect the sunny deposition of the baby-blue body with silver edging, while the K750i carries the darker, broodier, go-nastier-stripes of black and silver.

The K750i is an update to the K700i, launched mid-way through last year to much screaming and shouting from the press, but in our case only when we came to use it. Roll forward almost 12 months and looking at the K750i almost every aspect, of everything, is improved, working and making us enjoy playing with a mobile phones again.

The VGA camera on the K700i was superseded later in 2004 by the S700's 1.3 megapixel job on the S700. That, in turn, has been outmoded by the K750i's two megapixel camera, complete with 4x digital zoom and active auto-focus. A phone that actually takes decent pictures - wonderful. But it's not just the quality that makes the camera useable, it's the bodywork as well. The lens is protected by a sliding cover, manually moved on the K and operated by a flick-switch on the D. When the cover is moved to reveal the lens, the camera activates and is ready to shoot. The shutter-release button is mounted on the right-hand side of the body, so that when the phone is rotated anti-clockwise the release in on the right-hand side of the lens... just like a real camera. The cherry on the cake is that the shutter button has been so designed that light from the keyboard's LED escapes around its edges so you can find it more easily in the low-light conditions favoured by phone photographers. A double super-bright LED has been included next to the lens so you can throw a little more illumination onto the subject, and the photo-capture options are more advanced than on some cameras we've reviewed.

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