My new mobile phone - a Sony Ericsson K610i review

Today I received my new mobile phone, Sony Ericsson K610i.

I had been waiting for "The Perfect Phone" for some while because my earlier phone, Sony Ericsson K700i, is having some construction problems with the joystick (that Sony Ericsosn won't of course confess. But it is a general known fact that earlier Sony Ericsson joystick's are crap, dust collectors).

To put a long story short, I just have to say that I really like the K610i! You can read other general reviews of the phone (for example at Mobile Review) so I wont write anything conclusive. Just give some of my opinions based on some hours of playing around with it.

Pros

• 3G - I don't know if 3G has delivered even half of the huge hype from the past, but I just have to love it! It's not like wireless broadband but a great improvement from GPRS. Maybe the speed difference feels like the one between a modem and a ISDN connection; nothing like ADSL but a great improvement! 3G was one of the reasons I chose this phone.
  
• size - it's small. I wanted a small phone over a full features Nokia 9300i communicator for example. Weighting at just 96g it lighter than my previous phone, K700i. It's a bit taller in size, but then again a but thinner.
• RSS - a perfect application for a mobile phone. I what I really love, is the integration between the RSS reader and the web browser. If a web site has a RSS feed, I can subscribe to it directly from the web pages. I can schedule the feeds to be updated automatically or manually.
• Blogging - Blogger is integrated! I can take a picture and publish it directly on my blog without needing to login first. When I first published a picture from the phone, I got a new blog. But when I logged in to this "temporary" blog, I got the chance to merge the mobile blog with my real blog and then in the future all the entries are automatically published on my blog. It's really well implemented! You can take a nice picture and publish an entry for it in literally seconds.
  
• Camera - ok, so the camera is not anything like the one in K800i. It doesn't have autofocus or a flashlight. But who cares? I am not intending to replace my digital camera with my phone. The camera is a really decent 2MP camera that I can take snapshots with. The image manipulation features integrated in the phone are really good which will compensate a bit from the lacking quality of the camera. I can for example take panorama pictures, adjust color levels, brightness, eliminate read-eyes and other basic stuff.

Sony Ericsson has promoted very stongly Sony's Walkman brand. This phone does not have the Walkman MP3 player, but the MP3 player is really decent anyway! I can find songs by artist, genre and playlist. And the MP3 player is playing in the background so I can continue to use my phone as before. Nothing fancy, but works better than in older Sony Ericsson phones.
The phone also includes a Memory Stick micro card reader. I am thinking of buying a 512 MB memory card to hold some music :) (The phone description says that the card is not included, but my phone had a 64MB card inside!)

And needless to say, the Sony Ericsson's GUI is supirior to the Series60 GUI! It's really fast and intuitive. All the settings are in correct places, I can make my old shortcuts and the general placement of menus and icons just feels right, in contrast to the S60 GUI.

Cons:

• The web browser is unable to render event slightly more difficult web pages. I haven't tried using it with "Smart-fit" turned off or without pictures. But I guess Opera Mini will have to do.
  

Sony Ericsson K610i is a great replacement for my K700i! It has all the features I looked for in a modern mobile phone. One can always ask for mobile TV or iPod-like MP3 players in mobile phones, but I already have an iPod and I don't think I currently need mobile TV - I don't really watch TV anyway. So I was looking for a mobile phone and got one that suits me really well.