Sony Ericsson K700i: burning bright

Ergonomics and design

The human interface is identical to older models, with the Return key and the cancel ('c') key complimented by a five way joystick. Users coming from Nokia phones will find the 'c' infuriating. It serves just two purposes: backspacing over text input, and deleting entries from your phone book when you don't want it to. The 'c' on Nokia's Navikey interface performs the same function as the Ericsson return key, so newcomers will be pressing it more often than they should. There's little justification for a dedicated delete button which is used so infrequently, but which can cause users so much trouble. The graphical user interface has been spruced up and the high pixel density allows Sony Ericsson to use a twelve icon deck, rather than the familiar nine in older models. Each one of these can be activated by a corresponding keypad shortcut.

The K700i is sold, rather oversold in fact, on the virtues of its built-in camera. The blurb suggests that it's as much a camera as a phone, and the sleek hardware design consciously imitates a digital camera. In truth, however, this is a standard VGA with a few tricks up its sleeve. It allows video clips to be taken, can stitch three photos together into a 1.2MP panorama, and features an LED light. In practice, while the camera was one of the better VGA models in daylight, night mode performance fell far below rivals, with a grainy speckled effect ruining almost every picture. The LED doesn't make an appreciable difference here.

The K700i has over 40MB of RAM free to the users, which makes it a capable media phone, and an MP3 player is included. However with no removable storage, users must rely on Bluetooth or Infra Red to beam over songs, as there's no USB cable in the package we reviewed. Both are extremely slow.

The K700i has two aspects of the case design we saw with the P900: a very sturdy feel, and the now obligatory silly flap. The P900 featured a rubber door over the headphone socket, which was very hard to remove (after a few weeks, your reporter's resembles a well chewed pup's toy). With the K700i, the charging port is covered by a rubber hinge, which again, is far harder to open than it should be.

Now to the phone's major drawback: power consumption. Sony Ericsson claims that the phone can be used for 8 hours of talk time and 300 hours of standby time, but to put it politely, the handset we used came no where near these figures. Unlike the T68, this isn't a phone you want to separate from a charger for very long. We regularly got two days use out of it, sometimes less, and it chewed through the battery alarmingly when Bluetooth was turned on. The culprit, it appears, is the screen. Although the phone aggressively uses power saving time-outs (and annoyingly won't display the time, missed calls or new messages by default) the screen simply eats the battery far too quickly.

The verdict

A worthy alternative to a smartphone? Well, to be honest, unless you're addicted to being online, or checking the web every few minutes, the trade off in size and weight isn't so compelling. (Price is no longer an issue, thanks to Nokia's fire sale current discounting policy: a 6600 can be picked up for nothing, now).

The strongest reason for going to a smartphone is the very rich selection of games you can find on Series 60 phones. But as music devices they're not quite there: the Sendo being the best on offer. As offline readers, they're not quite there either, with the lack of a decent web/feed reader to siphon up favorites sites for the morning commute. GPS would be nice, too. All of which lends weight to former Symbian boss Colly Myer's prediction that smartphones will only come into their own once phones have to cope with the heavy lifting required by 3G, or VoIP, or IPv6.

If Sony Ericsson can alleviate the power consumption, this is a little gem we recommend without reservation to existing SE users, and with only a few caveats to Nokia users. ®

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