Uchiro's Tavelogue

The K800i brings the Cyber-shot branding that Sony uses in its digital cameras to a handset, throws in 3G video calling and data access, and bumps things up with Sony Ericsson's well known capabilities in the music-playing area.

Then, for good measure, the K800i adds in a smattering of other goodies such as a Web browser capable of using the 240 x 320 pixel screen in landscape as well as portrait mode, an RSS reader, FM radio, three games - one of which shows off the handset's 3D rendering rather neatly - plus ringtone creation and, it almost goes without saying, calendar and contacts applications which can share information with a PC. You even get the software and cable to make that happen.
But these pale against the great camera features, which include auto focus and something called BestPic. When you choose this shooting mode the camera takes nine different images in the space of a second instead of just one, and you can choose which you want to keep. I had doubts about the handset's ability to do this without blurring the images, but rigorous testing (which means waving the camera about mid-shot) proved me wrong.

There are some lovely touches. Two buttons sitting above the screen look more like designer knobbles than buttons but when you are in camera mode they provide a way into some of the settings and features. When you are not in camera mode one of them calls up your image thumbnails, so you can quickly find that picture of your baby / where you went last week / favourite food to show to your friend.

There are some less lovely touches, such as the presence of just 64MB of internal memory and the use of Sony's tiny little Memory Stick Micro cards for expansion (they are about the same size - and just as fiddly - as microSD cards).

I'm also not a fan of the way the headset, mains power and PC connection share the same proprietary slot on the phone. Music output quality is OK, but wouldn't you prefer to use your own headset? I know I would. And the 16x digital zoom for the camera feels like a red herring when what we really all want is optical zoom to avoid the pixellation that the former causes.
The niggles are relatively low level, though, and each time I found one, a plus point popped up to make the niggle seem less important. More than eleven hours of continuous music from the battery, for example, and overall hardware that is small and, at 115g, no trouble for most pockets.

There's also the ability to photo blog straight from the handset with a blog site automatically set up for you. Oh, and a xenon flash unit which proved more effective than the LEDs you find on other handsets.

The K800i is Sony Ericsson's finest handset to date as far as photography is concerned. It won't replace a real digital camera for serious photography, but it does a lot better than many other handsets with built-in cameras. And the rest of the features aren't bad, either.