Monday, May 01, 2006

Sony Ericsson K750i camera phone


I upgraded to this phone on Friday, and a very cute piece of equipment it is. Takes about four hours of hard work to get the hang of it, and then you have:

  • A very intuitive and high-quality FM radio
  • A 2 Megapixel still camera
  • A video-camera which also records sound
  • An MP3 player
  • A sound recorder
  • And of course it handles calls and SMS.

Comments. There is no view-finder, so you take pictures by looking at the screen. This can be hard on a sunny day, and worse if you are wearing shades. The quality, though, is excellent. The video camera takes unbounded-length video clips in 3gp format (I spent an extra £20 to buy the AVS video convertor tool set to map 3gp into more familar formats such as .avi and .mpeg). However, the 3gp format is extremely compressed - 30 seconds video in under 500 kB. The downside is that the resulting size is dimensioned to a mobile phone screen - just a little smaller than a credit card.

The USB cable linking to the PC makes the phone memory card look like a USB drive, (I bought a 512 MB card - currently available up to 2 GB), so moving MP3, jpeg and 3gp files around is just drag 'n' drop. All-in-all, a nice piece of equipment and when the 8GB memory card becomes available it will almost obsolete MP3 players (if they can figure a way to play music and have the phone off - needed in places like hospitals and aircraft).

We drove down to Chilbolton, five miles south-east of Andover, lunchtime today to take a look at the world's largest fully steerable meteorological radar, the Chilbolton Advanced Meteorological Radar (CAMRa) - site here. Unfortunately you can't visit, but the K750i provided the photograph above, cropped at the original resolution.