The phone wasn't a full production model. No carrier had been announced (though it might not be hard to guess), and a few bugs still needed to be worked out. Still, the K850 we saw was mostly what we'll expect when the phone goes on sale, possibly later this year. From our experience, Sony's Cyber Shot camera phones don't just brag about megapixels, they usually pack the glass to back up their boasts, and we've even been impressed with the lenses on other offerings from Sony Ericsson, besides the Cyber Shot line.
The K850 has all the amenities you'd expect from a high-end camera phone, including auto focus and a bunch of scene modes, but an optical zoom is still painfully absent. Though we'd read about the alternate-lighting buttons, which illuminate camera soft-keys in that mode, we weren't terribly impressed with the way the keyboard looked. It seemed as though the number keys should have been blacked out altogether to make the camera mode much easier to use.
Also, we had a lot of trouble using the screen on the K850, though the pre-production unit we were using had seen plenty of use and abuse recently. We weren't previously aware, but the K850 uses a partially touch sensitive screen. Instead of corresponding to soft keys, the options at the bottom are themselves the buttons, and only this lowest portion of the screen is touch sensitive. It didn't work very well in our hands-on, but we expect Sony Ericsson will polish this up before the phone's official launch, much later this year.
We weren't able to give the camera a good run-through, but we were happy with Sony Ericsson's ever-improving menu system, which is even more dazzling on the K850 that it was on the W880i. Unfortunately, the K850 also has very small, nubby buttons, like the W880i, which may make dialing more difficult, and texting extremely so. For four-way navigation, the K850 uses a large rectangular space on the keypad that surrounds the 2 and 5 keys, which took some getting used to. Instead of using this directional pad to select, you need to press the screen, so we hope Sony Ericsson improves the sensitivity greatly before launch.
We wondered aloud with our Sony Ericsson representative why the company didn't simply combine the excellent Sony Walkman interface from the Walkman phones with the Cyber Shot lineup to create a sort of super-phone, and he hinted that such an idea wasn't unheard of in the company's halls, but had no concrete information to provide.
In any case, we would like to see the K850 make an appearance on a U.S. carrier network, and with HSDPA, that probably means AT&T, though we wouldn't be surprised to find this phone for sale unlocked, instead. Still, with support for the U.S. HSDPA bands, this will be a device to watch for shutterbugs looking for a good phone that takes serious pictures.
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