Decent phone, shame about the review

El Reg's hardware reviews are never much good: look at their M600i review or N70 reviews, for example - little concrete information to base a purchasing decision on.

I've owned a K800i for a fortnight now and am pretty happy with it. I was pleased with the slickness and speed of the UI compared to other phones I've used.

The mail client works well, although its insistence on checking your mail every time you send an email is annoying. The built in web browser is functional enough, but I'm definitely going to try Opera Mini now. Java midlets run very well - it's got the latest J2ME VM, AFAICS.

The camera is OK, but the shutter lag is very annoying and the image quality, especially in difficult lighting conditions, is not that good.

Nokia lover turns to Sony

I got myself a Nokia N80 not long ago and found although i loved it the phone a tad slow still and the camera although much improved over my other Nokias i have owned no where near as good as the K800i

I also wanted just a phone with a decent camera than a full blown smartphone so the k800i is perfect..

but i will say the syncing with outlook is fantastic as i get all my diary, contacts and notes all downloaded to my phone without any trouble. only thing i would improve is the syncing being automatic where i can only seem to get it sync manually.. something i really miss from the nokia side of things

so in roundup from someone who lives and breaths nokia and always hated sony phones i love this.. everything is very simple to use

Which is a better buy?

if i had the option of purchasing either the K750i or the K800i which would be a better buy?

Sent mine back!

I got this phone expecting a big improvement from the feature set over my K750i but I was disapointed by the UI, it wasnt very quick, the music browsing wasnt very good. The most disapointing thing with this phone was how clumsy and badly designed it was, the lens cover looks set to break easily and it feels awkward in the hand. Sony have also decided to change the memory stick format again so the max mem you can get on this phone now is 1GB, I already had a 1GB card for my K750i and this is now useless, so...bigger phone, smaller/less capacity memory stick, more megapixels but less capacity from the memory stick.

Very disapointing, I will wait for the new Nokia phones to arrive later in the year, hopefully they will have sorted out their UI in this time.

K800i

Hmm, yes, where is the review of the phone?

I've had mine for a few days now, the intial battery life and indicators were awful, but after a couple of full overnight charges it seems to be running at a pretty similar rate to my K750i and W810i.

The one downside is that no memory card is supplied with the handset, and I'd love to have used the one from my old SE phones but the apparent change in standard means that it's time to go and fork out for another one.

The handset itself has an updated version of the Operating System which feels a lot smoother. The keypad suffers from one flaw for me, and that is I frequently press the button to launch the WAP browser whilst trying to press the back buttton.

Another nice touch is the ability to configure the phone to automatically connect to the net when plugged in via a USB cable to a PC - and the PC assumes it's USB ethernet, which makes connecting stupendously easy. Now only to get it to work with my Mac...