Rocking Team

Except… it seems that Sony Ericsson’s new flagship camera phone only has one eye on the Nokia N95 – and the other firmly set on the much-hyped, paradigm-shifting Apple iPhone.

Consider the evidence. The iPhone has a revolutionary touch-sensitive screen. So Sony Ericsson puts a check in the touch-sensitive box by grafting touch-sensitive soft menu buttons onto the K850i.

The iPhone has a built in accelerometer that detects the orientation of the phone and automatically reformats images into landscape or portrait accordingly. The K850i can do that too. document.write(“…..”);…..

The iPhone has slick glassy smooth surfaces so, yes, the camera side of the K850i ditches its recently introduced lens cover to offer a smooth-facing surface. (This has a real down side, on which more later).

You can’t help feeling that these innovations are led more by a worried marketing department than any usability concerns or customer demands.

For instance, the two touch-sensitive buttons work well enough in practice but their presence only serves to emphasize the fact that the rest of the interface has been designed solely for key-based input.

So when you arrive at the main menu screen after having touched a virtual button, your first instinct it to touch one of the on-screen items to activate it rather than use the new-fangled direction keys. It’s like being offered the keys to a sweetshop and finding they only give you access to the porch.

However there are features where the K850i is streets ahead of the iPhone. It now offers full 3G/HSDPA internet connectivity so web surfing and downloads rattle past at up to 3.5 Mbits/second. This is especially important if you want to email photos taken at the full 2592 x 1944 resolution as they weigh in at a whopping 1.5 megabytes a shot.

The Sony Ericsson K850i’s camera also offers proper autofocus and a bright Xenon flash. There’s an upgraded camera interface that makes the operation of the camera features much more like Sony’s dedicated Cyber-shot digital cameras. All this means that – for the most part – the K850i takes exceedingly high quality photographs, about as good as those taken by a £200 digital camera a year ago.

Why the ‘most part’ caveat? Well for some strange reason the flash doesn’t always sync properly with the shutter. So an apparently brightly illuminated shot will appear as dim or even jet black on the screen.

Occasionally the flash doesn’t appear at all – resulting in much the same result. And no, there is no setting to ‘Alway use Flash’: your choices are Auto, Red-Eye Reduction or Off.

The net result is a brilliant but idiosyncratic phone. When it’s good, it’s very, very good – the best camera phone you can buy in fact. But when it’s bad it’s bloody awful. There’s no middle ground for the K850i’s camera.

On that subject we come to the new lens cover. This is the third iteration of this particular widget in 18 months and Sony still hasn’t figured it out. What we have now is a lens cover that lies beneath the exterior plastic of the K850i’s facia and which automatically opens when the camera is activated.

Now this may look cool when you’re handling the device in the shop but its limitations in practice soon become obvious. The first is simple usability – the previous manual lens cover on the K800i and K810i also doubled as a switch for the camera – open the cover and the camera turns on also. You could even do it with your eyes closed – or in the dark – by feeling for the raised slider.