Sony Ericsson K550i-Economical Cybershot

I have been always fascinated by Sony Ericsson mobile ever since I started using their first successful model-T610. I have written a couple of reviews of Sony Ericsson phones before and also about my SE W700i.

So here is my review of Sony Ericsson K550i, which I would call as economical Cybershot. The huge success of K series started with the widely popular K750i. There are lot of similarities between K750i and K550i, but the latter is more advanced.

The K550i measures up at 102×46x14 mm, weighs 95 gms and easy to manage. The screen is 31×40 mm and the K550i’s display shows up to 262 K colors (TFT). The key pad is sleek looking and directly borrowed from W880i, there has been complaints that keypad could have been better, but I feel the new look keypad has something to offer. The numbers and the alphabets are not written on the keys, but it fits well above the keys. The backlight of the keypad is dark blue color and it displays the keys well.

The phone comes in two color solutions: Jet Black and Pearl White. Both the colors look appealing, and it is really difficult to which one is the better.

Phonebook: Up to 1000 contacts with fully filled in fields can be stored in the phonebook, but number of phone numbers is limited to 2500. This means that despite the ability to assign up to 5 phone numbers to one contact, you cannot go over 2500 entries. This is enough even for the most active users, as only few have more than 500 entries in their phonebooks.

Messaging: All the tools used for managing messages are standard and similar to the ones used in common handsets. The smileys have been given a face lift. The MMS implementation and the Email client are also impressive ones.

RSS Feed: The settings for this item are really simple and all you need is to specify the title for feed and its address. The phone will connect and download it without your assistance. You can update only one item, or the whole feed at once. Built-in browser are used for displaying the feeds. Feeds may be updated on schedule.

Entertainment: The phone has a software for editing music files called the Music DJ. This can also be used to create ringtones. The advanced version of this is called Video DJ which saves files in 3GP formats. Another useful software available is Photo DJ, which can be used to edit photos taken with the camera and its quite impressive.

Camera: The phone has a 2MP, auto focus camera with in-build flash. This is one of the strong points for getting this model. The camera is mostly similar to the one used in K750i, but the external casing and the lens cover has been given a change. The photos taken with this model is quite impressive and comparable with digital cameras. The device supports three possible resolutions - 1632×1224, 1280×960, 640×480 pixels. There is also provision for capturing videos. Videos taken are just average and looks inferior with Nokia models in this range. This is one of the aspects which Sony Ericsson needs to improve on.

Other features are;

• Radio
• Media player with equalizer
• Ability to run several third-party Java-applications simultaneously
• Organizer
• WAP/GPRS
• Connectivity
• File Manager

The performance is lightning fast and promises to be one of the hot selling models of future, just like the big brother K750i. One feature I liked very much is the ability to run multiple Java applications at the same time. This feature I have already explained in my review of Z710i. You can minimize the applications. For testing I ran the media player, a Java based game and dictionary based application. All the applications worked fine and switching between them is pretty easy.

The K550i priced at Rs. 11500/- in India (price varies from place to place). The phone is really worth and if you have fallen in love with this model, go buy it. As I said before this is an economical Cybershot.

Sales package:

• Handset
• Battery BST-33
• Charger
• ?2 memory card 64 Mb
• CD with software
• Wired stereo-headset

Rating: 4/5

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Photo Courtsey: Sony Ericsson

1USD= 40.74 Rs.

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