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Sony Ericsson K800i : Far from being a "perfect" phone!

14 reasons of NOT buying it!

I own a (Vodafone branded) Sony Ericsson K800i for about 4 months.

As a phone might be OK but its menu (typical Sony Ericsson) is far from being "perfect". I use the phone daily and I have found some disadvantages. Just think about them before buying it to make sure they suit yourself.

These "little" disadvantages (or annoyances) could probably upset you or can make your daily living with the phone a bit frustrating!

Sometimes the phone's functioning gives me the impression that the people who designed it have never used or tried the phone afterwards! This explains why Nokia phones simply rule the market!

Let's see now what these "annoyances" are:

1) The Calendar reminder tone is very short, poor, weak, hardly audible and cannot be changed (either as a tone or volume). 99.9% you will miss the time when the reminder goes off, and 99.9% you will miss that important meeting or task you have set the phone to remind you about.

2) The Sony PC Suite is a worthless, primitive and useless program. I am surprised why SE insists on distributing it (especially if you compare it to other vendors' PC suites, e.g. Nokia). It does not give you even the possibility to backup your SIM/phone contacts in a file on your PC. It can only transfer your contacts to Outlook. But even if you use Outlook Sync to do that, the program has a lot of bugs and it will surely miss to transfer some of your phone numbers, i.e. some of your numbers won't download/upload correctly. This has happened to me. I have >500 contacts with each one having more than 2 phone numbers stored in it. The program only transfers most of the time only 2 of the phone numbers (under the same contact. The 3rd and 4th numbers are lost and you have to type them manually!. You have to use 3rd party programs (i.e. MyPhoneExplorer) to do it correctly and safely. I am surprised as to why a SE person had had not noticed this! ARE THEY USING THEIR PHONES?

3) The "image stabiliser" in the camera works only with the "landscape" and "twilight landscape" scenes. All other camera scenes do not support the image stabiliser!

4) In each contact you can store up to 5 numbers (mobile, home, work, fax, other), but IT DOES NOT give you the possibility to name more than one number under the same type, e.g. to have 3 mobiles, or 2 home, etc.

5) When composing an SMS, it does not countdown (from 160) the remaining characters. Only when you reach 140 characters it starts countdowning the remaining characters.

6) I does not store delivery reports on SMS. You have to go to the "status" of the message to check if it has been delivered. There is however a pop-up screen that the message has been delivered. But it does not store this message delivery report. You have to check one by one the status of each sent message to see if it has been delivered or not.

7) Fast dialing needs the pressing of 2 buttons (one for the keypad number and one for the "call"), i.e. you cannot press-and-hold a keypad number to make a fast-dialing call.

The keypad is very-very stiff and it needs hard and accurate pressure on each button. The buttons are not well spaced and they are very close together. You cannot type very fast. If you try to type fast then you will surely make a lot of mistakes by typing the wrong keys! At night (or day), you can hardly identify or distinguish the keypad buttons by just touching at them while not looking at them. You have to always look at them to avoid typing errors!

9) The video quality is awfull. This is because the phone does not have a graphics card. Do not bother at all about the video feature. It's not worth it!

10) No option to change the ISO setting in the camera. Picture quality at night is poor. The camera raises automatically to ISO 400 in all night pictures producing very noisy images. And there is no way to change the ISO to a number lower than 400! Daylight pictures are good though (ISO 80).

11) Assume you have a contact stored in your phone memory. And under this contact you have stored more than 2 mobile phone nummbers. If this contact sends you a SMS then there is NO WAY to see which mobile number (from the two) sent you this SMS. The phone identifies and displays only the name of the contact that sent you the SMS and NOT the associated phone number. There is NO information about the phone number that your contact used to send you the message.

12) Assume you compose a SMS and then you send it to someone. After you press the button to send the message the phone does not return you to the screen of the composed message. This is very annoying in case you want to send this same message to someone else(s). You have to go to the main menu and then to Messaging>Sent Messages to find the message you already sent in order to be able to send it again to someone else.

13) The joystick started presenting problems with just only two months of use! The down direction needs hard pressure to be activated. If you apply light pressure (clicking sound heard) the joystick does not function as it is supposed to do!

14) It is a cumbersome procedure and it takes too many clicks to change an already stored phone number in one of your contacts.

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Posted: 2007-02-12 22:36:37
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I've had my silver (bond) k800i since O2 UK released it and have had nothing but good times and admiring glances.
The joy stick has never once given any problems and being an
ex PEBL and w810i user texting on the k800 is worlds better
( a real keypad AND big keys )

I've never had issues with poor images or sound, but have to admit to
not using the video capture yet !

It's been some years since I used Nokia's own software (it was cr4p then)
but I'm not going to defend SE's pc suite - that is a very serious over sight. As has been said ... install the drivers and then MyPhoneExplorer.

I agree that in this modern "mobile" world a single entry per contact for a single phone type is wrong ... I too have several contacts that require
multiple mobile number entries ! Yes the alerts "options" are far short of
what they should be, volume and changeability should be available to
the user.

The only real gripe I have is the lens cover. This appears to be very much
an after thought on SE's part - just look at the K750i's rather more sleek
design and you'll see what I mean.
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Posted: 2007-02-12 23:06:43
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Because the poster can't tell the difference between a KRZR and a K800i.
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Posted: 2007-03-17 16:04:11
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i love my k800.......great upgrade from my previous k750
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Posted: 2007-04-17 05:38:06
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If you look for a good (and free chat software for your phone, try SubliMobi bluetooth chat (http://www.sublimobi.com).
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Posted: 2007-06-20 15:19:14
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Just in response to a few of your annoyances...

1) - Good Point

2) - Backing your contact directly to the Storage card is surely a better option. As well as having the contacts stored in Outlook... Sure I had to sync 350+ contacts, and there was a fault. In so much as the session tined out. Re-started and it completed fine. Naturally, this shouldn't be a problem from now on... Never seen the selective transferring of numbers. In every case it's sync'd all of the information...

3) - Ok granted, but I don't have many problems taking excellent photos on my phone...

4) - MS Outlook only gives you one Mobile field!!!

5) - Why, do you need to see how many characters you written if it's less than the max? This sounds like a much better option...

6) - Sounds like a good place to store them. Otherwise you would be opening every report to find the one that relates to the message that you sent.... What about the pop-up message that should the delivery of the recently sent message? DO you send that many messages that you get confused?

7) - True - but who said speed dial is a one button press? Two would still be faster than looking up the contact and selecting the number then dialling.

- Stop texting in the dark.... it's no good for your eye's.... Granted not the best keyboard...

9) - It's a phone not a video recorder.... I've always said that if you buy a product that does 3 in 1 like a drill, sander, stripper. Your not going to get a very good drill sander or stripper, just the convenience of having all tree in one.

10) - It has a flash!!

11) - OK but why do you need it? Call or reply from the text!!

12) - SE's support multiple names in the send to... try adding additional names to the to: box. God that really annoys me, everytime you send a message from a Pokia the fuc........... message stays on the bl.......dy screen... I've sent it I don't want it any more... get it the fu.............. off my screen....

13) - True - and SE are slow to fix this problem... hence the new K850 doesn't own one..... About time....

14) - Have you tried the auto sync?



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Posted: 2007-11-12 10:58:09
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How about the performance of it's joystick? Any problem you've experience guys?
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Posted: 2007-11-23 08:47:19
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bought k800i twice, my first k800i has been stoled by a thief and i buy k800i again coz this phone make me fell amazing...
good camera phone, it's branded as cybershot not for nothing bro..
good looking, it looks simple but elegance..
good 3G, and u can use it as modem and connect trough PC easily,
this phone really has a reliable feature to be used
and if u know all the trick on it, just try it by your self, it's really great bro...

by the way the navigation key has disadvantage, but that's not a big deal as we use it properly i guess...
and so the display so easy to get scratch on it, but u can use crystal case..
the sound is better than nothing, i can't say the sound bad or good when u turn the speaker on but the sound is great when u use the headset especially the HPM-70..
at first sight no operating system in this phone is annoying but i thinks that is good decision, coz this is no computer, when u get OS on the phone u just waste ur time everytime u execute some program. more than that u has to subscribe to some antivirus program just to protect ur precious os enabled phone from virus attack...

never regret to have K800 on your hand...


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Posted: 2007-12-20 04:47:58
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3) The camera quality is still garbage compared to a real camera. There is alot of noise and artifacting due to heavy compression. Unless the pictures are in direct daylight, they will be in no way comparable to a standalone camera.

6) Your point makes absolute no sense.

7) Ever since speed dial has been invented, it has worked in the following way: you hold down the button and it calls the person. It is much easier to speed dial that way. Sony wanted to be different, and all it did was annoy people.

People like the ability to text without having to look at the keypad.

9) The phone was marketed as a camera phone, and every camera these days has a decent video recorder. Hell, even garbage free phones come with better video recorders than the K800i's. Sony could have at least added a crappy QVGA recorder, but they were being extra cheap. Yet, they still charged a premium for the phone.

10) Good cameras take good pictures without flash because flash can ruin the integrity of the shot. It can also cause alot of glare. In fact, that's pretty much how you can tell how good of a camera it is: how good its shots are without flash! Also, the K800i's flash has a very short range.

11) Seriously, wtf? Wanting to know which number a text is from is so obvious that it shouldn't even be disputed. Again, this is an expensive phone and people expect intuitiveness.

12) Do you think maybe that you might want to send DIFFERENT messages to different people?

I am not a Sony hater; otherwise I wouldn't buy their products. I just like to tell it like it is, and I think Chris_De_Ze has some valid complaints.
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Posted: 2008-01-13 22:44:58
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ive been using K800i for a week now. so far i have no reason to hate it..


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Posted: 2008-01-22 06:07:05
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