Friday, June 13, 2008

Sony Ericsson K550i (Review)

Good bye my good old Nokia 3120,you've been serving me for almost 4 years. Thats not an excuse to keep you longer with me. Things do change,so do I. Welcome home my all new Sony Ericsson K550i (I'll use "SE" instead of Sony Ericsson through out this article!)
I wasn't a SE fanboy at all, I did hate their menu structure,especially the fact that the space bar button is to the right(in contrast to Nokia's bottom-middle key),needless to say I did texting more often than anyone of you :P,as for a witness my outgoiung txt msg count was somewhere around 8500 and incoming was around 23000, that is hell a lot haa:D. Ok its enough bragging about the old rag, lets start with my SE550i review.

The Sony Ericsson K550i( I would say this is a bang for the buck)



Most of you may have seen the technical specifications of the SE K550 on Gsmarena.com, but for the rest I'll include the most basic Specs here.
P.S . The SE K550 review on gsmarena.com is based on a prototype model so that review is no longer valid(most of the features are changed)


Network :Quad band
Dimensions : 102 x 46 x 14 mm
Weight :85g
Display type : TFD(Thin Film Diodes- Battery friendly) 256KColors
Resolution : 176x220 pixels

The phone supports Memory stick micro (M2) slot and features about 70MB internal free memory. It supports all common connectivity methods except 3G and Wi-Fi
Thats pretty enough for an introduction, lets dive deeper, would you join me ? :D and forgot to tell you, I'll be focusing youngsters rather Business personnel in this review, so basically on the Processing speed, Audio quality, Camera ,Video playback and Applications

At the first glance you will notice that this nifty phone is pretty slim( not the slimmest though) the display is vivid and very bright (TFD Nature) . And another noticeable thing is the awkward keypad buttons. It was pretty hard for me to get used to it, but after fiddling with it few days i could somehow satisfy. I was surfing the internet and saw the JBenchmarking web site and got to know this little phone was a wicked performer. "ARM 9 CPU @ 201MHz", when I saw that I was like "Wow",even the very popular and expensive N73 has the same Cpu running at 209MHz.
The UI is quite fast and very responsive,even when you run 5 or 6 apps it's still the same. Audio quality is satisfiable, tell you what ; SE K550 has the exact same hardware as the W610 which is a walkman 2.0 device. So this K550 can be easily flashed to a W610 so comes the term "Cybershot-Walkman".
The 2MP camera is pretty much OK for the price you pay,needless to say its much better than most of the mid-range Nokia 2MP cams. Auto focus and powerful LED flash lights play a vital role here. The K550 sports a panorama mode as well as macro mode which can be used to take closer shots.









Video playback is impressive,even a high bit rate(512Kbps) QVGA resolution video can be played without a glitch(remember the ARM9 201MHz CPU?). Video quality is also adorable, you will feel like watching a video on your PC.
So guys and girls if you are on a tight budget (like I was) and looking for the best within the price range don't think twice go and get this.
Thumbs up!