RutSum

My New Sony Ericsson K530i

I recently bought a new phone from Sony Ericsson, K530i, which is really sweet. My budget for this phone was around 7-7.5k and the K530i was the best phone I could find in this range. The main feature that I was looking for was a very high battery life, and the K530i indeed had the best battery life (both talk time and standby time) when compared to other phones in the same range with similar features.

The feature list is quite typical of the phones from today – a 2 MP camera, a media player which supports most common mobile formats (MP3/AAC/MPEG4), an FM radio with RDS, Bluetooth with A2DP and expandable memory. Other not so common features (in India) include 3G support, a secondary camera for video calling, and built in support for mobile blogging. For me, this was a really pleasant upgrade from the extremely annoying Samsung SGH-E250.

Other features include support for external Java apps, which means nice games . It has a really nice keypad with tilted keys which is good for typing and general navigation. You can charge it using a data cable, just like an iPod. The quality of the default earphones provided is very good.

One thing that I don’t like about the phone is customisability. Though the features are almost exhaustive, and every aspect of comfort/usability has been taken care of, you still feel that you’re using a Sony Ericsson phone and not your own phone. The other thing that is missing is an application/folder locking feature. This is a big con for privacy fanatics out there, and guys who like to carry their private data with them on their phones. Another problem that I faced with this phone was related to the USB drivers for Windows and detection of the phone. When I connect it to my computer using the data cable, sometimes, it does not get detected at all, and I get a ‘USB Device not recognised’ error. Then I have to switch off the phone to transfer data. This problem however has disappeared again (maybe just temporarily) and the device is recognised immediately, even on my PCLinuxOS system.

Also, while in ‘Data Transfer’ USB mode, the phone gets switched off, and all phone functions (except alerts and reminders) are unavailable. The maximum volume from the speakers of the phone is too low when compared to the maximum volume of the ringtones in the phone. All 3 things – data cable, earphones, and charger use the same port, so you can’t go handsfree while charging (this is not a problem for me as I have a bluetooth headset, read ahead for details).

I bought this handset from Hotspot, and so I also got a Bluetooth headset free with the phone. I also bought with a ‘Hotspot Care Pack’ for Rs. 600, which upgraded my 1 year warranty to a 2 year warranty, and added an additional ‘Accidental Insurance’, which includes damage caused to internal parts due to ‘unintentional’ accidents (Yes, their T&C included that clause).

It’s been 2 weeks with this phone and I’m loving it. Here are a few pictures I took with the 2 MP camera.

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