Sep
17
1. Price
First and foremost, I must be able to afford it.
2. Features
Within my budget, I desire to have the best features around. Around that price range, no Nokia phones will be able to fit into that criteria. The 6230 which is closest to what I want, has a LCD screen too small for my liking, and is too expensive as well.
3. Design
I don’t think any Nokia phones would fit into my idea of a good design. Maybe the 6230. But not the rest. I’m sure many others do not like Nokia’s recent designs. Sure, they try to be different, but the problem lies with their taste. And functionality is getting affected in the process. How the hell do you operate a 7280 normally? Other brand’s design are quite nice, but unfortunately they are too pricey for the features I want.
4. Unique
Unique not as in glaring designs, but the amount of people who uses it. A low range phone which not many people use, a little hard to find, eh?
From all these criterias above, I finally found the phone I wanted. The Sony Ericsson K508i. It was the obvious choice in my price range.
Differences with the K500i
Many of you will probably wonder, what’s the difference between this phone and the K500i? Nothing much actually, technically they are exactly the same, except for the way the keypad is arranged. Something which many people don’t know, is that the radiation level of the K500i is 0.53W/kg, while the radiation level of the K508i is 0.88W/kg. I didn’t know about this at first, I only knew after I purchased it. I overlooked this fact, but anyway, 0.88W/kg is still quite okay. The Z1010 meanwhile, has a radiation level of 1.41W/kg. Now that’s something to compare with. Despite being a 3G phone, I’ll probably not touch the Z1010 with a ten foot pole.
Design
The design of the K508i, in my opinion, looks more balanced than the K500i and the K700i. Some people hate this design, but I quite like it. The thickness of this phone varies, it’s thicker at the top than at the bottom. Reminds me of a Nokia 3210. Occassionally, the keys “4″ and the right soft key gets stuck, but I’ve learnt how to live with it and once I got used to it, the problem didn’t surface again. The backlight of the keys are orange in colour, which looks quite nice, although I would prefer blue. The keys are metallic as well, unlike the K500i which is made up of transparent plastic.
My phone was a combination of black and silver, which looks quite nice.
Build Quality
This phone definitely has better build quality than recent Nokia phones, which creaks and creaks and creaks. This phone creaks as well, but not as bad as Nokia phones. Also, it seems to be made of better quality plastic than of Nokia phones.
The Screen
The screen is very crisp and clear, and can still be seen on a sunny day, as it possesses a TFT screen. It displays 65,536 colours with 128×160 pixels on a 1.9 inch screen, which is one of the largest screen I’ve ever come across. Strangely, although it has a bigger screen than its elder brother, the K700i, the resolution of the screen is not as big as the K700i. Still, everything looks sharp.
Memory
The K500i comes with 12MB of memory, of which 9MB can be used by the user. It’s quite a generous amount of memory, although there is no room for memory expansion. 9MB of space will be able to store many pictures taken via the VGA camera, games and MIDI ringtones. However, I don’t think anyone will be able to make good use of the mp3 player in this phone with only 9MB of memory. I have my iPod mini for that.
Messenging
Composing SMS is a breeze. Unlike older Sony Ericsson phones as recent as the T610 and T630, this phone doesn’t suffer from any lag if you compose them too fast. The T9 system is very speedy. What I didn’t like was that the word limit was only shown when you were close to exceeding the 160 characters.
You can compose MMSes using the WYSIWYG editor, it’s quite easy to use, and I quite like it. However, I didn’t really use this feature, as sending out MMSes is much more expensive than sending out an SMS.
MusicDJ
The MusicDJ function lets you compose polyphonic ringtones. There are a few preset stuff you can use. However, you cannot compose them in the style of Nokia phones, which lets you choose the tone you want to use.
Games
My K508i came with four games. They are Darts, Fighters, Super Real Tennis and Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow. They all didn’t provide any entertainment value to me and I had to download my beloved Puzzle Bobble game. Puzzle Bobble on this phone appears to be quite a bit faster than on the Nokia 3200, which makes it slightly tricker as well. This phone supports 3D games, besides J2ME games. I couldn’t get Nokia games over here though, it wouldn’t let me use SIS files. If it would, I would be happily playing Bounce on my phone.
The Internet
This phone comes with WAP 2.0 support, with a cHTML browser. However, I suspect the cHTML browser to actually be an xHTML browser, I could surf all pages normally, sometimes rendering pages better than on my Nokia 3200. The phone has a dedicated key to go straight to the net, it’s located on the right of the phone.
Making Phone Calls
Phone calls are generally very clear and loud, which is a good sign. There’s are two dedicated volume buttons on the left hand side, for turning the volume up and down during a phone call. When you are not in a phone call, those two soft keys serve as a way to check your free memory left in the phone.
Phone Book
The phone book can store over 500 entries, and it’s easy to add or remove a contact. You can add several numbers under a contact, which is what many phones can do nowadays. Camera
The VGA camera included generally outputs photos of clear quality. You can choose between 1280×960 (intrapolated), 640×480, 320×240 and 160×120 resolutions. You can use digital zoom on 320×240 (2x) and 160×120 (4x) resolutions.
Besdies taking pictures, you can also take videos at a fairly low resolution. There’s no limit to how long a video can be, it doesn’t restrict you to 100kb like some phones.
The lens has a cover, which prevents it from getting scratched. There’s also a mirror for taking pictures of yourself. There’s also a dedicated camera button on the left hand side of the phone, to faciliate landscape pictures.
Music
This phone has support for 40-voice polyphonic ringtones, besides that, you can have mp3s as well. The mp3 feature is fairly useless, with the little amount of memory onboard, at most you can only store about 10 minutes of music at acceptable quality. The speaker is very loud though, if you set a ringtone volume to the one of the higher settings, it will display a warning saying that loud ringtones could damage my hearing. Be warned!
Reception
Reception is quite good with the K508i, although once I couldn’t get any signal while on the street. Turning off and on the phone solved the problem. In the subway, there was full reception as well.
Flaws
And every phone has its flaws. This phone has a stuck keypad occassionally. Also, it doesn’t come with a radio, which is strange nowadays. However, you can purchase a radio kit for S$60 (~US$40) which will work on this phone.
