It’s time to look at the Sony Ericsson K850i, a mobile phone which belongs to the Cybershot line, and stands out as a camera-feature-only phone. The K850i turned out to be much better than what were expecting, especially in terms of the little details, but at the end, the details is not what matters, and the camera is the most important part on the phone. We will introduce the K850i in the following paragraphs and discuss the need of such a phone.

A mobile phone timeline [Source: KhE ?'s photostream]

For mobile phones to evolute there has to be implementation of new features. Those features are divided in categories.

Sometimes those categories are made into series by a manufacturer, and such an example is the Cybershot series from Sony Ericsson. The Cybershot series are centred around what Cybershot really is – cameras. Every single phone in the Cybershot line is a great camera-phone, a fruit of Sony Ericsson’s experience in this type of electronics.

A Sony Cybershot digital camera [Source: PMA 2008]

As I said previously, for phones to evolute, there has to be implementation of new features. In the Cybershot line, the camera and its functionality are continuously improved. The Sony Ericsson K850i is an example of that improvement and meets the demand of higher resolution captures, better night images, and ease-of-use of a camera. There was a need of a mobile phone with a camera sensor that could replace a digital camera, and Sony Ericsson addressed it under the name of K850i.

Sony Ericsson K850i Cybershot

Besides the K850i, the Cybershot series features the K550i and K750i with a 2 megapixel camera,  K800i, K810i, K770i, and C702i  with a 3.2 megapixel camera and C902 with a 5 megapixel camera. The upcoming C905 will feature an 8 megapixel camera and will compete against the Samsung INNOV8 i8510.

From left to right: K850i, C905, C902, C702, K810, K800, K770, K750, K550

The K850i has very direct competitors, and can only play in the camera-feature-only market, where it will face the Samsung G800, G600, and LG Viewty. If it tries to face against the N95 or N82, it will be squashed by their features: they are smartphones with GPS, the N82 has won the TIPA (Technical Image Press Association) award, proving itself being the best camera-phone around, and the N95’s 8GB variant has 8GB of internal memory to store all the high-resolution images. The Motorola ZN5 came a bit too late not very surprisingly, and will rather face the upcoming 8 megapixel camera-phone from Sony Ericsson, the C905 Cybershot.

The best 5 megapixel camera-phones in the global market: Nokia N95 8GB, LG Viewty, Samsung G800, Samsung G600, Sony Ericsson K850i, Nokia N82

The Sony Ericsson K850i features a 5 megapixel camera, Xenon flash, a 2.2″ display with QVGA (240×320 pixels) resolution, selection touch keys, accelerometer (motion sensor), HSDPA, FM Radio with RDS, multitasking enabled software, and a very useful flashlight. It supports the following networks:

• EDGE
• GSM 850
• UMTS 2100
• UMTS 1900
• HSDPA
• UMTS 850
• GSM 900
• GSM 1800
• GSM 1900

You can check the full specifications at the K850i official page.

Sony Ericsson K850i just out of the box

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