The K800i, everything I want, almost

I'm a sucker for new technology. I love it. I try to convince myself (under the pretense of convincing others) that I buy my new gadgets for the furtherment of my career, that in doing so I will gain insights and knowledge, but the truth is simply that I love toys, and I must buy them.

And so I swapped my Samsung z320i for a Sony Ericsson K800i last friday, and I'm delighted.

First up the design, mostly good. I got the bronze colored model, just to be different, and it looks very good.

A few worries that I have are the lens cover and the joystick. I can see the cover getting torn off, as I'm not kind to my tech, and it will be going from the office to a building site, up hills and beyond, and its likely to be sharing my pocket real estate with keys, tapes, knives and god knows what else. I'll accept its not a fitting environment, but I think they could have made the body slightly thicker on average and introduced an interior cover and reduced the thickness on the whole by losing the external cover.

And now the joystick. In my experience joysticks break. The joysticks for my Atari ST all broke, the Joysticks for my PCs all broke, and the joystick for my K700i broke, several times. I pray this one won't.

And now the good stuff. The camera is superb. Brilliant. And so handy. Shopping for PCs on Saturday it just let me snap all the spec sheets in the stores and compare them at home. Quality was excellent. Walking yesterday in South Kerry I was busy snapping away with it while my girlfriend made off with my Olympus E300 (some how I still ended up humping around the lens bag). Again, quality was brilliant (I'll post some later). Its not the first camera phone I had, but its the first I would consider to be worth using the camera on. The in-build flash is actually a flash as well, and not just a bad torch. And the straight to blog feature is great! Video quality is good as well, useable at least anyway.

The interface is great, and its full of useful apps. It doesn't use DoJa java, which is great as far as I'm concerned, as I felt that it crippled my z320i. All the standard stuff is there. In particular I like the great RSS reader (easy to link to here, just convert your atom feed to RSS). Copy and paste is available through the apps, so going from sms to email is a breeze.

One error that is getting my goat is that I can't connect to GMail on it, but I suspect the fault there lies with 02, so anyone in Ireland who overcame this hurdle give me a shout.

The keypad is a bit small, but not terrible so. You'll get used to it!!

Syncing with OSX isn't too difficult, just grab a plugin ( I used the one here ) and it all worked fined. This isn't a problem with the phone, its apple. As of yet though I haven't got it running as a bluetooth modem.

On the whole, a great phone, for the money I'd say the best in its range on the Irish networks.
   

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