Hans Across The Interwebs

Yesterday I went out and got myself the new super duper K850i Sony Ericsson flagship phone. I’ll post a more extensive review once I’ve had this thing for a while but here’s my first impression:

Whoever was in charge of designing this phone is an idiot. Or on pills. Or both. It’s an extremely aggravating phone.

The first thing is the ‘touch screen’. It doesn’t have one, there’s only three touch sensitive spots on the screen. Basically they’re the old ‘yes’ ‘no’ buttons. It’s a clear concept, but its very counterintuitive. When ‘just clicking away’ at the phone I kept pressing other spots on the screen. Obviously that won’t work, but it took conscious effort to change that behaviour. That’s called counterintuitive.

Second idiotic thing is the navigation buttons. They got rid of a perfectly good joystick and replaced it by some glowing square that sits in the middle of the number buttons. Up is above the 2, down is under the 5. It’s ridiculously weird, though it may be a productivity boon: it will completely prevent you from playing any games.

When the phone rung the first time I was completely confused how to pick it up. None of the screen buttons say ‘pick up’, and the pick up and hang up buttons have lost their green and red colours. I’m not saying I can’t learn, I’m just saying it’s counter intuitive. A phrase that keeps coming back to me.

Next: this is supposed to be a media phone. Upon start up it has one of it’s three navigational ‘buttons’ dedicated to ‘media’. You can’t change that. Click media and you get this kind of ‘player’ interface. My gripe with this is: how am I supposed to get the stuff on there? Ah, plug the phone in, select USB mode, copy, paste. No thanks, I’ll stick with my iPod, particularly because it has a REGULAR HEADPHONE JACK. Jeezusss, the only headphones you can use are the ones SE gives you. AHHHH it drives me nuts.

Of course the thing people want most in this phone is the cybershot camera, and they’ve definitely made some improvements. Losing the camera cover is very practical. Also the special camera buttons that light up when you turn on the camera is excellent. The ‘dedicated camera functions’ are now usable and you don’t need to keep going into the menu to, for instance turn the flash off.

My last phone was the K800. The k850i is exactly the same size minus the lens cover. It feels much smaller though, which is a good thing.

Another little but significant improvement is that the short cuts can no go directly to an application (like the opera browser). In the K800 it could only go to the applications folder. However, there’s not earthly reason why they couldn’t fix this on the K800 as well. People aren’t nearly upset enough about this. Apple gives a button the wrong colour and people are up in arms. Sony can fuck up all over the place and no one gives a shit. Sorry for ranting.

This phone also has over the air firmware updates. You don’t need to connect to your PC any longer. Which is nice because I don’t use a PC. I sure hope there’s a firmware upgrade soon though, because I also keep getting random disconnects, number I somehow “can’t call”, and intermittent success setting up data connections.

So there it is. I’d say be very aware of what you’re getting into with this phone. It has some excellent points, it has some weird points and it has some downright dumbass crap design decisions.

I’ll be posting more thoughts as they come up.

Got anything to add or ask? Let me know in the comments.