Friday, March 14, 2008

Just out of interest

I upgraded my phone in January, and all the photos posted to this blog this year have been taken with a Sony-Ericsson K850i rather than a K800i. This has a 5 Megapixel rather than a 3.2 Megapixel camera. I think the quality is quite lot better. The new camera handles low light and shots with flash much better than the old one.

Sadly, though, I think the phone may have gone backwards in other ways. Sony-Ericsson fixed the two most annoying things about the K800i: the lens cover that came open in your pocket and the SIM slot under the battery. However, they messed around with the user interface and controls on the main keyboard. This is a shame, given that this was the area in which the K800i was right the first time. This is annoying, and I think it means the K850i is not going to be quite as successful as the K800i (which was a huge hit). Shame

A camera in my phone that is good enough for day to day photography needs for web publishing has been a holy grail of mine for a while. I don't carry a dedicated camera everywhere, but I do take a phone. this desire on my part has led to me upgrading phones a good deal more often than I would have otherwise, which is probably what the phone manufacturers want. I'm still not there, but I might only be a couple of more phones away. 5 Megapixels is plenty - it is all about sensor quality now. (Actually I am aware that it has been all about sensor quality for several phones now, yes). There are one or two phones available now with optical zooms, although I am not sure how important that is. I guess I will see next upgrade.
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2 comments:

AlanL said...

I have no choice in this particular matter, since my K800i died in a thunderstorm in the mountains (from getting wet, luckily, not from being struck by lightning), and I have decided to need HSDPA. I otherwise found the K800i rather good, and a semi-decent camera is on my list of priorities (to save me sepnding big bucks on one of those cute little Ricohs), so a K850i is in my immediate future.

On another subject: I'm having no success getting mails through to your work email and I fear I don't have an up to date personal email for you. Could you drop me a line re Frühlingsfest? I'll be in town.

5:27 pm
Michael said...

One further serious improvement of the K850i over the K800i is that it has the ability to appear as a generic USB mass storage device when you plug it into your computer. So transferring photographs to your computer does not require you to install software or drivers on the PC or to use a card reader (which is fiddlier with those little Memory Stick micro cards that it uses. You do need to carry a cable, but I do that anyway as I am known to use the phone as a modem.
(One can leave the cable home and use Bluetooth I suppose, but I find that too much trouble).

And now come to think of it, another step forward is that the K850i takes micro-SD cards as well as Memory Stick micro. Sony is finally joining the rest of the world in this regard, which is good to see.

11:16 am

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