The K750i is jam packed with applications and functionality…

Day to Day:

Using the Sony K750i is really a treat. The user interface is well thought out and nice to look at. When you switch between icons, they shrink and enlarge. When switching between menu items, there are smooth transitions. Windows and tabs gracefully slide back and forth. And even the little menu selectors are animated to highlight the selected option. The display’s high resolution does a great job of showing off these added animations.

After syncing contacts over with iSync, the corresponding applications on the K750i work as expected. Finding address book contacts is straight-forward. Contacts are listed by name and you can find their phone numbers, email addresses, web url, snail-mail address and more. Calendars are laid-out by month and can be viewed by week. iCal ToDo lists are listed under “Tasks.”

Fun Apps:

The K750i is loaded with fun apps and functionality:

FM Radio: First is the built in FM radio. It only works with the headphones plugged in, as they server as an antenna. Their earbuds that come with the phone as they have a proprietary connection, so you won’t be able to use your favorite headset. Once plugged in you have the choice of listening through the earbuds or using the phone’s external mono (but good sounding) speaker. The interface makes it easy to find new stations, save them, and even see station displayed information like the stations call letters or even song names.

Camera: The next fun app is the 2megapixel camera. The easiest way to start taking pics is by opening up the cover on the back of the phone. If you start the app from the main option menu and you don’t have camera cover open, a white LED under the shutter button (on the side of the phone) blinks and a message on the display remind you why you’re only seeing black. After opening the cover, if you haven’t already noticed, you’ll see part of what makes this phone great—the resolution on the display and the great camera you’re seeing through. With the camera cover open, the phone automatically switches to landscape mode, and the controls instantly make sense. Now you’re using a digital camera, not a phone. You can click the settings and change how fast the phone camera takes pictures, resolution size, macro, night mode, camera light (two bright LEDs on the back), timer, effects, white balance, jpeg compression (for the quality of pics), time stamping, changing the file numbering, and saving to Memory Stick Duo or on the phone. Whew! Again, remember that this is a phone with all these options! When you use the control stick and push down (which is really left when you’re using it as a phone), you can record video, where you’ll get most of the same setting options as the camera. The highest resolution you’ll get out of the video is 176 x 144 pixels, so don’t think you’re going to be bootlegging motion pictures with this phone. The vide is recorded in H.263 format and is saved as a .3pg file. The length of the video is limited by the amount of memory on your stick—which is nice that there aren’t artificial limitations put on the device.

Photos taken in camera mode at the highest resolution were quite impressive. I typically use a 3.2 megapixel digital camera but rarely use the highest resolution because I just don’t need it for developing into paper photos. Photos taken at the 1632 x 1224 resolution were nice, with little graininess or discoloration you might get with a “traditional” camera phone. The macro on this phone worked better than on my Canon S30. In dim light, the “night mode worked well, but not quite as well as a regular digital camera, and the camera light gave the image a flashlight-in-a-tunnel feeling. You can see some of the full size photos taken with the camera to evaluate for yourself.

You can pull your photos off your phone via Bluetooth, or you can use the USB cable which has two bonuses: it will charge the phone and it will mount a drive and launch iPhoto to suck down the photos into your library! Nice. (I wonder if this will work down the line with iTunes?). Unfortunately, with USB, the iPhoto will only pull down photos, not any video you’ve taken (but you can do this over bluetooth and as a mounted drive). Navigating through the file structure is a a bit of a pain, but remember that photos are kept in /DCIM/100MSDCF, and videos are kept in /MSSEMC/Media Files/video/camera. When connecting via USB, there does seem to be some “kernel panic” when disconnecting, however someone has already come up with a fix. Hopefully this will get figured out soon.

Games: Games on this phone are pretty cool. I’ve never played 3-D games on a cell phone before and on the K750i, I’d say they’re pretty compelling. This phone came with a fighter jet third person shooter, a third person tennis game, and a comparatively lame picture puzzle game. The video quality was no Playstation, but still was impressive on a phone. For occupying your time in the metro on your daily commute, the games hit the spot.

Media Player: The Media Player on the phone will play both audio and video. It will automatically find music and videos if you want to play all of them, or you can make play lists on the device itself. I discovered that you can’t play media stored on the Memory Stick Duo when the K750i is connected via USB. Not a big deal, really, but just wanted to note it. The phone is able to play mp3 and aac music files, but not songs downloaded from the iTunes Music Store (yet). And although the file would show up in the File Manager, the K750i couldn’t play a recent RocketBoom Quicktime .mov file, I found that RocketBoom had specially formated files for phones in the .3gp format and that worked really well in full screen mode on the K750i. The video playback was acceptable, but had more to do with the encoding of the file than the performance of the K750i. I can really see this kind of functionality catching on, especially for video podcasts like Diggnation and Command-N.

File Manager: File Manager works pretty much as expected, allowing you to somewhat browse the file structure of the phone—giving you mainly access to media files and some java applications. It’s a phone, not a PDA, so don’t expect to be finding Word documents or anything.

Messaging: Messaging gives you the option of sending text, picture, or voice messages, as well as emails if you input your mail settings (both POP and IMAP). I was impressed with the T9 letter selection (for those of us who never got a hang of using a phone to write out messages) and Word completion, which both help to make typing out a message easier. It’s still a pain to type out messages (though not any worse than any other cell phone), so if you plan to do a lot of text messaging, you might want a phone with a “thumbboard” (like a Blackberry or TREO).

Bluetooth Remote: Using your phone as a remote control for your Mac can come in handy. Typically, this requires third party software like Salling Clicker, but the K750i has some functionality right out of the box. Specifically, you can use the K750i to control the your mouse. Again, this functionality used to be a program you had to download, but new to Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, the remote mouse and keyboard functionality is built in (you’ll see it during the bluetooth setup of the phone. Although the phone comes with the ability to use it to control presentations (say via Keynote or Powerpoint), and even a media player (say iTunes, DVD Player, VLC, etc), those programs didn’t work on the Mac, (at least not yet). The folks at Salling have a lot more functionality in their program (like bluetooth proximity controls and advanced functionality with other OS X applications) and really cater to Sony Ericsson phones. However, the current version (2.2.1) doesn’t work with the K750i, but the soon arriving version 3.0 does and is being actively beta tested according to their message boards.

There are two more java apps that come bundled with the Sony Ericsson K750i, HP Bluetooth Printing (which I was unable to test) and a world clock (which simply tells you your time zone on a cool 3D globe).

Whew, That’s it for Day Two. Check back soon for my wrap up on Day Three.