Geeks.com were very generous to send us in one of Sony Ericsson’s best sellers: the very popular K700i. We took it for a quick spin and here is our mini-review. The phone sports a 176x220x65k color TFT, 64 MB internal storage (41 MB available for usage) a VGA camera with video recording capabilities, a flashlight and night mode, Bluetooth, IrDA, MMS support, 40-voice polyphonic ring, tri-band, Java MIDP-2 games, FM radio, Mp3 and .3gp media player, email client, WAP/XHTML web browser (OSNews renders pretty well both in its WAP and its cHTML versions), speed and voice dialing, chatting, voice recorder, speaker phone, themes, calculator, calendar, alarm, stopwatch and picture phone book (512 contacts limit). The phone features a 700 mAh battery and it came with the latest ROM in it (no need for any software upgrade).
The package includes a lanyard (though I could not find where to attach it on the phone), manuals, software CD, a handsfree kit (with 2 earbuds, it also works as an FM radio headphone), the power adaptor and the phone itself. The phone has a medium-to-small size compared to what’s on the market right now. In my tests, battery life lasted about 6 hours under heavy use: making phone calls, playing games, playing-back mp3s and using the FM radio. According to the manufacturer, the phone has more than 10 days of stand-by battery life. An early ROM version had a bug where the phone would report low battery status while it still had quite some left, but the bug does not seem to exist anymore in this latest ROM version (“RZAY004”).
The phone feels very good in the hand, however people with larger fingers might encounter a bit of trouble at first with dialing quickly. The joystick is rigid enough and it doesn’t slip away when navigating with it or playing games, while the volume up/down buttons, the camera ON button and the “Online” button (dials your ISP or via GPRS) are well-placed. The contacts, call history and the rest of the UI are quite intuitive. In fact, comparing it to Nokia’s series 40 or Motorola’s ROKR/e398 it’s miles better. UI-wise, this is the best phone I have ever used. I especially liked the Calendar, which is very easy to use and navigate through. Signal reception of the device was normal, nothing exceptional though.
The phone comes with 3 pre-installed games (one of which is in real 3D), a voice recorder application and a MusicDJ application, which is a midi instrument kit allowing you to create your own melodies and save them as ring tones. The camera quality is similar to the ROKR/e398 (4x zoom VGA), and the video recording capability (with sound) is a welcome feature over the e398. You can see a movie sample: “JBQ feeding the ducks” (use ‘Save As’; best viewed with QuickTime 6/7). The package does not come with the needed USB cables for the PC (optional items) but the Bluetooth syncing and uploading/downloading worked fine with my Powerbook. I was able to install games via Bluetooth and sync my address book (OSX Tiger supports the K700i fully). Speaker quality is pretty good, although not as good as the ROKR/e398’s. The headphone quality is not bad either, but definitely not what you want to use if you are listening to mp3 or FM radio seriously. Too bad that the phone doesn’t include a normal headphone jack for those who want to use better quality headphones.
There are a few other small inconveniences with the phone, like the rubber protection on the AC/data ports which gets in the way, the freezing of the UI for a second while typing (rare occurrence, but it does happen) and the weird re-ordering of buttons on Java games (some games need way too many on-menu clicks to get things done while this is not the case on other phones even when using the same .jar binary (e.g. vPoker 1.0)). Also, trying to enable the speakerphone while on a call is problematic (you have to take the phone away from your ear and navigate the menus; there is seemingly no shortcut for that option). However, the single “real” problem with this phone is the fact that it doesn’t have a removable memory slot to allow for memory expansion. 41 MBs is great for normal use, but the phone can do so much more with mp3s that it goes to waste because the lack of memory expansion. This phone is in almost every way much better than the Motorola ROKR/e398 (it even runs faster!) and it could have been a much better “iTunes phone”. Especially if it could allow for FM recording to a memorystick card that would really rock!
The K700i was the best feature-phone on the market last year (of non-smartphones) and even this year remains one of the top buys. For $219 it comes at a fair price for the feature-set it offers. If the small inconveniences I noted above bother you though, have a look at the K750i which was released only a few months ago. It solves pretty much all these small issues of K700i and some say that it is the best feature-phone of 2005 (but it is more expensive than the K700i). In any case, both phones deserve your attention and if you are on a small budget, the K700i is an excellent buy.
Pros: great screen, easy to use, bluetooth, video recording, FM radio, mp3 player, IrDA.
Cons: no memory card slot, some small inconveniences here and there.
Overall: 9/10
Isn’t this phone like 1 year old. I know it is being replaced by it’s bigger, meaner brother- K750i already. That would be more useful review, although even that is already somewhat outdated.
You are overdoing it. The K750i was released in June, it is a brand new phone from that point of view. And the K700i is very-very relevant still, because it was one of the *best phones of 2004*.
Don’t forget that the Motorola ROKR iTunes phone is a 2 year old phone in reality (hardware and software-wise), and yet Motorola re-released it 4 days ago (3 new major features only in it: video recording, airplane-safe mode, iTunes support)!
So, no, a 1-2 year old *good* phone, is STILL relevant today and it can cover many needs for many people.
Jeez you guys are behind.
The K700i has been replaced by the K750i that has been replaced by the W800 that in a way has been replaced by the K608i 3G phone.
Go suck a Motorola brick.
erg, the k750i and w800 are nearly identical phones, one not really replacing the other, just slightly modified for there respective markets. I own a k700i and have for going on 2 years. It is a great phone. I think it’s well worth it to review a phone that sits in it’s price range regardless of age. In the $200 category there are few phones that can do what the k700i can and at the quality it can. Another thing to mention, for US people, the k700i was never released in the US, when I purchased mine I paid about $350 from overseas. If I didn’t have a k700i today this review (along with others) and the price point, would almost for sure cause me to buy it again.
Forgot to add to the previous comment. I purcahsed an HP HW6515 about 2 months ago. I planned on using the HW6515 for email, etc… for business purposes. I have turned back to my K700i for critical situations because my HW6515 has shined as being a battery sucking, app freezing, 2 minute boot time piece of crap. So to say a 200 dollar unlocked sony phone is actually much more reliable and nearly as useful (no keyboard, no GPS) as my HW6515 can say a lot. BTW the email functions on the K700i are quite functional, and word completion is excellent.
I’ve found that the # key seems quite loose. This is especially annoying when constantly used for SMS, as that is the ‘space’ key.
I recall from when I had a SonyEricsson phone that they were dreafully *slow*. You could type in a whole sms message, then lay down your phone as the screen was still catching up with the things you typed in. Very annoying.
Do problems like that still exist? My current Sharp TM-100 is fast as lightning– no delay anywhere.
This problem does not exist with the K700i/K750i. These are high-end feature-phones, they use fast CPUs.
It’s not slow at all actually. I’ve never had a problem with the words taking time to complete. The newer firmware versions definately fixed some of the minor performance problems I had at first. One minor complaint is that sometimes the Bluetooth handshaking locks up and I have to turn the phone off and on.
Having programmed many J2ME apps I must insist that the new generation of Sony Phones (K700, K500 …) are like a thousand times faster than the T610 series (not even sure this is an exageration). The T610 had the most horribly slow Java VM ever seen. Especially the v1 firmware version that were buggy to a point unknown to manking.
The K700 and K750 really made me change my mind about the power of Sony phones. Compared to say other MIDP 2 phones from Motorola they are really much much faster, not mentioning the 3D chip inside.
Telephony is a fast moving field. The latest model of a phone is barely news, and something a year old is really, really not news. Sorry Eugenia, but what is the relevance of a review of a year-old product?
Hey, it’s still an improvement over my Sony Ericsson T206A.
No, this is not “news”, OSNews posts feature articles too, not just “news”. This is a review of a product found today at a fair price in the market and that still covers lots of people needs. These people might want to learn more about this purchasing option. This is where this review comes in, filling a gap in information.
This is slightly off-topic, but does anyone know of any existing or upcoming SmartPhones that have onboard GPS, bluetooth, mp3, digital camera, and some sort of to-do list+calendar app?
I’m looking for recommendations on what’s hot and what’s not … as well as links and prices.
No GPS, but it does have Positioning (triangulation of transciver base stations, can be very accurate). Excellent phone with excellent, sharp camera (no aliased pixels, like with some higher resolution ones), plenty of applications, including calendar, contacts etc. Of course it has bluetooth, and it plays MP3s off MMC cards, which is really nice.
http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,,65362,00.html
Oh, yeah, it’s a Series 60 phone, which means you can find applications for nearly anything you want. And tons of games, too.
My brother bought the Nokia 3230 last month. He is very happy with it, but he was sad to see the box coming without the PC cables. He bought a Nokia-compatible cable (DKU-something I think) and he DID install the 3230 drivers for it too, and yet the Nokia sync manager would not recognize the phone. He has to now use Bluetooth to sync/install stuff (works great with Bluetooth, but it’s limited to 20 KB/sec).
Eugenia wrote:
> I especially liked the Calendar, which is very easy to use
> and navigate through.
Does this imply that the calendar on it is actually usable, as opposed to most SE calendars? At least the calendar on my SE T610 doesn’t even support recurring events, which is the most used type (e.g. birthdays, anniversaries, classes, weekly meetings, weekly/daily TV shows, and whatnot). Also, I can’t get my calendar to show all events chronologically, which means that I have to manually go through each month to look for old events that I might want to remove. My calendar looks good but otherwise it’s very, very bad.
I use my K700i with my mac without any problems. Syncs are easy. Nothing to worry about. Not sure about repeating events since I don’t use them much.
I’ll never buy another Sony phone after having a UK T610 and a US T637, they are dreadfully slow at booting and loading things and navigating with that dodgey joystick, they also crash a lot. I expect it’s Java’s fault….
I never even knew mobiles could crash until I tried Ericcsson! Also, their tri-band support is lacking – you usually have to upgrade your firmware before going abroad (at least with the US versions) as the carriers have to be supported too.
The K750i and W800 are not the same phone – they may look similar but the K750i is 2.0MP not 1.3MP, and there are various other differences too, they’re about as similar as the 750i is to the 700i!
Next phone will be back to good old Nokia (and Python!)
> The K750i and W800 are not the same phone –
> they may look similar but the K750i is 2.0MP not 1.3MP,
> and there are various other differences too, they’re
> about as similar as the 750i is to the 700i!
Actually they might not look that similar but actually they are basically identical phones, both are 2.0MP for example. You can even flash the K750i with the W800i software and get some of the features it’s lacking (flight mode, better media player). The only real hardware differences other than design are in the lense cover.
As i said above you should not compare a K700 with a T6xx. They are really different machines. T610 and clones were slow as hell, especially for java. Maybe they wanted to promote their mophun thing.
My daughter managed to crash her k700i by uploading a java game to it via bluetooth from her iMac.
It seems to have crashed or frozen and has a flashing white screen, tried removing the battery and/or sim to try to reset it, no luck.
Anyone know how to deal with this?
TIA
This phone is great for the first week or two, thereafter it becomes very clear that it rushed out the door without any “real-world usage” tests. I have many complaints about this phone and I’m considering switching back to my 5 year old siemens phone even after 6 months of using the K700i.
1. There are numerous software bugs. (Incorrect phone list sorting. A missed call 2 minutes ago is less important than an incoming call yesterday, etc). (Names get displayed incorrectly. I have Bob and Sue in my phone book, but if I call Bob, Sue will show in the history… )
2. You can’t “RETRY” an SMS. If the SMS doesn’t go though, you have to save it to drafts and go find it to retry sending it. It’s easier to retype it sometimes.
3. Keys’ functions change according to menu. EG: “C” means delete the last character when typing an SMS. However, when typing a name in the address book for quick indexing, it means delete entry. Not delete the last character typed.
4. Plastic casing is very easy to break. Do not drop the phone at all.
5. The joystick is already refusing to acknowledge some of my down strokes.
6. The keys are too small. I can’t hit them comfortably when typing.
7. Accidentally invoking really bad actions by slipping on the keys or “option prompts” using the same keys for confirmation which were used to invoke the prompts, is really poor. For example: after several weeks of SMS’ing, go to the “My words” and see how many words have accidentally made their way into the list by slipping on keys.
8. Seriously, why can’t I use the radio without the headphones? Couldn’t they have a little, internal aerial and let me chance my luck. I have to carry wires around to listen to the radio.
9. Redialling doesn’t work. It says, “redialling…” and then nothing happens. Ever. No information. This is another software bug.
I know I’m whining but I hate this phone. Really I do. It’s a piece of pretty engineering that nobody bothered to use before releasing.
By the way, there’s a service menu which is accessable by doing these keystrokes: right, star, left, left, star, left, star. (that’s joystick right and joystick left).
Some of the software problems you are describing are fixed on the new ROM. I suggest you upgrade. The phone I reviewed used the latest version.
I feel you’re too harsh, but still have many valid points.
4. Totally agree with the plastic casing..I dropped mine, and now I’m thinking about getting it serviced. It got a real nasty bulk in it.
9. Re-dialling. I see this too! Sometimes it just hangs…very annoying.
On the upside though…it’s a great phone for connections. I can connect to any other phone…my computer…my pda…my photo-printer…anything!
And Opera works great and looks fantastic with it!
The k750i is offered free on most UK networks now, not sure about the US, but here the k700i is obsolete.
I spend a lot of time in the US, but come from Europe. I find that phones in the US are generally more outdated and higher priced than in the US.
Don’t ask me for the reason though.
And yes, in most parts of Europe the K700i is obsolete and has been replaced by the K750i entirely.
Maybe the prices of communication, terribly high in Europe are the reasons for not being able to “give” 500$ items for “free”.
Maybe the prices of communication, terribly high in Europe are the reasons for not being able to “give” 500$ items for “free”.
In the UK, mobile phones come free or cheap because they’re “locked” so you can only use them with a particular mobile phone operator (although it’s relatively easy to “unlock” phones). Most mobile phone operators want you to sign up for a fixed-term contract (e.g. 6 or 12 months), so the free phones are another incentive.
However, the mobile phone market in the UK is actually quite competitive because mobile phone ownership in the UK is very high (at least 70% of the adult population). There are a number of competing mobile phone operators, and a huge number of price plans available (including many that offer various amounts of free talk-time), so it’s not too dificult to pick up a good deal.
This phone is awful!
The picture quality is terrible compared to my old Nokia 6600. The meaning of keys changes depending on which function you’re using. The camera key doesn’t activate the camera. It lets you take a shot when you’re in camera mode. Then, the placement of the button is counter intuitive – you place the phone in portrait position to take a landscape shot and vice versa.
As it happens, today I went back to my Nokia and I really notice the difference. It’s a phone you can use for work. The K700i is really an attractive toy.
I completely agree with this. Any 100$ digital camera will give you a better picture than any sony phone (and most other brands). The K700i camera really sucks. The K750 is better but still, I’d rather have a 640×480 clear image than a 12 megapixels image full of noise.
I really look forward to Nokia’s N91 with Carl Zeiss optics.
Sharp phones like the Gx30 were the first phones to have decent quality pictures (meaning most of the resolution is actually useful).
One of the big problems of mobile phones when you talk applications — not only those from Sony — is that they have a lot of features but half of them are not implemented in the java VM. The k700i for example has bluetooth support. Yet, in the java vm.. it’s not here. You have to get the latter K750i to get it.
I won’t even list the number of bugs the firmwares have when they are released and how hard it is for end-users to get it updated. I really feel they just don’t care about it. As long as the phone looks good people will buy them with all their bugs and then users will complain about software authors being unable to write stable software.
At the same time they are asking developers to get “pro” by creating business-oriented wireless apps but limit the VMs to only the basics you need to write puzzle games. This is getting better with time but the truth is that:
Most of the phones on the market today:
– with a camera can’t access it from java (they should!)
– with bluetooth suffer the same problem.
K750i is one of the first phones I saw that seems to have implemented in java most of the features (although you can only capture images at 160×120 pixels from java.. so much for a 2.0 megapixels camera).
The lanyard attaches under the battery cover, there’s a little slot just behind the power connector. Just so everyone knows
Took me a while to find it as well…
I can belive that in this review they priced this phone over 200 dlls. here in Europe you can get it cheaper, for example in http://www.amazon.co.uk you can get it new for 85 pounds close to 155 dlls. and used ones just for 126 dlls. so they should offer it cheaper and not for over 200 dlls.
I forget to mention to people who say that cells are cheaper in UK because they are locked that you can find a person in almost every street to unlock your phone just for around 10 dlls so i think this is not a problem and some times you can do it even by yourself for free.
Dropped it once, but did not damage anything except for a few scratches
The rubber cover at the bottom of the phone looks ragged
Battery life not great – can take me thro’ a day and a half with about 1.5 hrs of talk time. Bluetooth and mp3 can suck more
Software does have quirks – call list gets messed at times showing the wrong person called. Optimized Charging gets stuck on screen and I remove the battery to fix that
Switching to Speaker phone mode is difficult
But its a good enough phone for the price with all features – love it.
Eugenia, if you could compare the overall screen quality of K700i and E398, which has the best? I have both phones here and I find the E398 screen *much* better. It’s brighter lit and has better resolution (176×220 if I recall correctly).
I find the two screens’ quality identical. The e398 includes an option to change the brightness whereas SE does not. But when viewed on the same brightness (K700i defaults to medium brightness), I find the screens as being the same. Resolution is the same too.
Scratch that ‘better resolution’. They have identical screen resolution.
Old phone, but please buy it since Ericsson is swedish
I think a review of the w800 would be more intresting, it’s branded walkman and comes with 512MB memorystick. (Yes, it plays MP3)
I have used the K750i for a few days and it is a really great phone. 2Mb with autofocus, meaning you essentially have a real compact camera in your pocket. Great radio reception too. Jave games are simply fantastic.
Very short review in dutch (sorry!), including a picture taken with the camera from my balcony (bottom of page):
http://royalty.typepad.com/main/2005/09/mobiele_fun_voo.html
You really can’t compare the picture quality with the 1.3Mb cameras by SE. I also have an V800 UMTS phone and the picture quality is terrible.
I owned the K700i fot 1.5 years and got the K750i when it became available. It is so much better:
– The camera is 2MP and the pictures are very good, especially outdoors and during daylight. It completely replaces a stand-alone 2MP digital camera. The VGA camera on the K700i is a joke.
– memory is upgradable via Memory Stick up to 1 or 2GB. I have a 1GB stick and I have room for 4 full movies (at the moment: Star Wars IV, Kill Bill Vol. 1/2 and The Big Lebowsky, all converted from DVD to 3GP), several hundred photos in max resolution and several dozen MP3s. It is a great entertainment center to go. 41MB on the K700i cannot compete.
– You can connect it via USB and it is recognized as an external harddrive. Very convenient.
– The design is less bulky and the finish has clearer lines. The display is crisper.
– The K700i is OLD 😉