Introduction and design

As part of TechRadar's Phone Week, we're republishing the reviews of classic phones from the dawn of the smartphone era.

Here we have Sony Ericsson's classic K750i handset, which came with a 2MP camera - which for the time was big news. It also offered a whopping 100MB of storage space, which makes us feel slightly bad when we complain about 'only' 16GB of space.

This review also gives us a frightening glimpse of a world before iTunes and Spotify, where you could listen to snippets of music, then use PlayNow to pay £3 a track to transfer the songs to your phone.

One thing we do miss about these times is battery life - the K750i lasted over a week on a single charge where now we'd weep tears of lithium-ion joy if we could get half that.

Original review, published June 2005

If you want an excuse for not going 3G, this is it. Sure with 3G phones you get high-speed downloads, great online video content, the ability to see the person calling you, and stacks of calls for your cash. But you can't get a phone quite like Sony Ericsson's new K750i.

This is no ordinary top-of-the-range cameraphone. This has been built to offer the very best that GSM has to offer. It is the life and soul of the party thanks to its on-board music player, radio tuner, games and full range of GPRS download services.

But where it most impresses is with its camera. This is about the best specified digital camera on a phone that we've yet seen.

On paper, it is similar to the Vodafone-exclusive Sharp 902. But as the Sharp is a 3G model, the K750i has an immediate edge in terms of size and weight. There is a very respectable two-million pixel camera built in – but it still tips the scales at under the 100-gram mark.

It doesn't offer the optical zoom of the 902 – but it makes up for this with a far more responsive autofocus system, that zips in to snap impressively sharp pictures even when shooting from just a couple of inches away.

This is a camera that will really deliver the type of results that businessmen can use for reports and websites, and that the rest of us can use to produce respectable prints for the family album.

You could think of the K750i as being simply an update of the K700i, which follows in a long line of highly respected cameraphones that can be traced right back to the T610. However, the six-fold jump in camera resolution makes comparisons with Sony Ericsson's first megapixel camphone – the S700i – almost inevitable.

The difference is not just that maximum resolution has been increased, but that the device now looks much more like a phone than a standalone camera. At a time when you thought mobile phones had finished getting smaller, it's a feat of miniaturisation that takes the breath away.

The design brief has once again been to produce something that looks like an ordinary phone from one side but looks like a digital camera from the other. This two-faced approach is disguised by the use of a sliding cover that obscures the 4.8mm f/2.8 lens and self-portrait mirror when not in use.

However, when taking pictures you are encouraged to turn the device sideways as if it were a proper camera – and then use the top-mounted rocker switch to activate the 4x digital zoom, and the neighbouring shutter release to take the pictures.

On the opposing side of the camera you find a rubbery plug that covers the slot-in memory card. Being a Sony Ericsson, it is not a surprise that this is one of the MemoryStick family of flash cards. What is surprising, is that you get a 64MB MemoryStick Duo card thrown in with the handset.

When this is added to the 34MB onboard storage, the handset offers an amazing 100MB of memory straight out of the box.The memory slot is compatible with Duo Pro cards, which currently offer a capacity of up to two gigabytes in a single MemoryStick. The expandable memory is likely to be of particular interest to those wanting to use the handset's music (and video) playing facilities.

A special play/pause button is provided to aid the use of the playback of MP3s and other digital file formats.

You can hear through the built-in speakerphone – or you can plug in the supplied headphones if you want to hear in stereo; these attach to the multipin accessory socket, which means you can't charge the battery as you listen (a 3.5mm standard minijack socket would have been better).

Turning to the phone 'face' of the device, the screen appears modest in size – but its specification proves that appearances can be deceptive. Colour depth has been increased to 262,000 colours (compared with 65k on the K700i), and there is plenty of detail in the 176x220-pixel array.

Navigation through the extensive line-up of features is provided primarily by mini joystick – although that is rather too small and slippery for our liking. There is also a lack of standardisation about whether you press in the joystick or use one of the two softkeys to make selections, and this gets particularly confusing when using the phone turned sideways as a camera.

However, you could soon learn a path around these teething problems. A programmable short cut menu with its own separate activation key is well worth making use of, if you want to avoid excessive button pushing.

Features and performance

Most cameraphones don't focus the lens before taking the picture. The lens is fixed on a spot a few feet away, and then relies on the tremendous amount of depth of field that small-sensor digital cameras can produce from their wide-angle lenses to ensure that everything is sharp.

However, this means that you can't take shots right up close to your subject. Autofocus (AF) changes all of this, as the lens can adjust to suit the subject distance.

The AF takes some getting used to and you need to press the trigger part way down to activate the autofocus system. You see the target lock, and if it takes a satisfactory reading it will beep to tell you that it is ready to shoot. You see the result of the adjusted focus on-screen – and this is a good thing because the autofocus system can't tell what part of the scene you want in sharpest focus.

It guesses that it is in the middle of the scene, and if it's not, you have to train the camera on the item you want sharp, activate the focus and lock it, before recomposing the picture.

It sounds complicated, but it is what normal cameras require you to do. And besides, the benefit is that you can really fill the frame with images. There is even a switchable Macro facility, which will allow the lens to focus automatically to within just a couple of inches of the subject.

This is superb for making 'photocopies' of pieces of texts or illustrations that you might want to keep for future reference (and ideal for collating low-cost wallpapers images). If we were being picky, the lack of an optical zoom lens is a touch disappointing but the 4x electronic zoom can be used at the top resolution setting.

The top two-million pixel setting generates JPEGs that average around the 350KB mark in size. This number of picture elements means that you can produce 8x6inch prints using the usual 200dpi benchmark used for inkjet printers; you can also reproduce images at 5x4inches using the more demanding 300dpi used in professional printing.

The pictures delivered in our own field tests were extremely impressive – streets ahead of what is produced by a normal cameraphone. There was good detail, and exposure although not spot on,was accurate enough even in tricky lighting and with difficult subjects. Colour balance was also exemplary.

We did note, however, that picture quality improved markedly in good light. In low light you do have the option of using the built-in flash, which does a good job of raising the illumination level, but does little for the aesthetics of the shot.

This camera also gives you a lot more creative and fun controls than many other models. There are 20-odd borders to superimpose over your shots, for instance, as well as some nicely-executed digital effects.

There is a handy panoramic feature that not only stitches three shots together for you to make a widescreen vista, it actually provides a ghost image of the previous frame, so that each section lines up with the last as perfectly as possible.

You can, of course, shoot movies with the camera – although the resolution then falls to 176x144 pixels.

The audio quality produced by the music player is also extremely good. There's real punch to tracks played over the headphones, although you do have to watch that you don't crank the volume up too high if you are to avoid distortion.

Not only can you load your own music using the MemoryStick or the supplied USB lead, there is also direct access to the PlayNow download server, which will play snippets of tracks for you to taste, before you pay £3 a pop to have them transferred in full to your phone.

If you do not like paying for the latest sounds, then there is always the built-in radio. This FM tuner allows you to keep entertained and up-to-date without the need to pay for downloads or WAP pages.

The phone is supplied with a good library of onboard software. Our test sample came with an luxurious-looking aerial combat game, and a quality tennis simulator; there is also a picture puzzle game which you can use to turn your photographs into electronic jigsaws.

Just as useful and entertaining is the DJ suite of programs, which allow you to edit video, music and photographs on screen.

Performance

The great attraction of this phone is that it has got it all (well, almost). It offers full-feature Bluetooth as well as infrared. It will work in the States, thanks to tri-band operation. It has an email client. It can be controlled by voice commands.

When you add this to the music, download, memory and camera capabilities you have a real winner.

Even the battery puts in a startling performance. We had to double check our notes. But the handset kept running for over a week on a single charge – 172 hours in total – during which we took a couple of dozen high-resolution pictures (and beamed them to a PC via Bluetooth), played with most of the different features, and made some 30 minutes of calls.

Voice quality, following in the Sony Ericsson tradition, was also first class – and signal strength gave us no cause for concern, despite the absence of an external aerial.

The price is even reasonable.With a suitable contract it can obviously be free for high-user deals; but for those who like to pay for their privileges it can already be found SIM-free for under £300.

Sure, there is no smartphone operating system – and we can't help but dream of a similarly sized 3G model. But if you are looking for the best GSM cameraphone that you can find, this is it.

Verdict

The Sony Ericsson K750i appeared just at the cusp of a time when traditional mobile phones were slowly transforming into the smartphones we know today.

So although the K750i didn't have an operating system or apps, it featured an impressive (for its time) camera and some decent media playing features.

Total Mobile was impressed enough by the K750i to give it 86% in issue 133, but a new wave of smartphones that would change how we used our handsets forever was just around the corner.

• This article is part of Phone Week, celebrating the best bits about brilliant smartphones as part of the lead up to the TechRadar Phone Awards. To find out what the iPhone 7 could look like, how a phone could survive in space or just learning how to buy the perfect smartphone for you, bookmark TechRadar's Phone Week hub and check out all the great new content coming throughout the week!

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