Introduction

Yes. Again. Another Sony Ericsson handset which doesn’t bring about even as much innovation as a wooden sword. It’s exterior will make it sell of course, I too have made the mistake to take this phone from a series of new ones because it looked so good. Although it doesn’t have anything new in means of functions, it is situated somewhere between the K770i and the K550i, but it still will be a successful phone. Because according to the majority of people it looks good.

It makes me very sad that nowadays Sony Ericsson is not the manufacturer we got to know a few years before. Back than they had the courage of bringing about new things, developing and surprising the market. This had as a result the rightfully successful Walkman and Cyber-shot series, but making a living of the same old things two years later… we weren’t expecting this.

Meanwhile the others are silently slipping away. We were scolding Samsung before for the same thing we are reproving Sony Ericsson for thereupon the Korean manufacturer is lately just throwing out phones which, even if they are not a revolution, have something new on them. We had the F700, the great G600, the G800 equipped with an optical zoom, and the surprisingly good F330 (test coming soon). Nokia wasn’t idle either, he had such results in the business sector that it was a real joy watching the Finnish brand returning to its former glory; theN82 is a really outstanding one, the E51 held its ground superbly in the bit cheaper phones’ field, and I can measure the success of the 6120 Classic by looking at many of my acquaintances.

And Sony Ericsson? The W960i has been finally released and it turned out to have the same machine inside like its predecessor a year before. The K850i has at last been released too, but no matter that many had great expectations from its camera; it has been simply humiliated by the needle-sized lens in the G600. The T650i is a beautiful handset, but not even that had any developments and the W910i has been successfully ruined by the 2 megapixel fix-focus lens. Hello, wake up! It would be high time to come up with something big as we haven’t seen in a long time something from the manufacturer for what we could have appreciatively nodded our heads, like in the case of the T68.

Exterior

The K660i unambiguously and exclusively goes for the exterior, but that is much stressed. I had the possibility to choose from two colors (and so will the customer have these two choices): there is on one hand the green and white which we can see on the pictures (do the Fradi-supporters start to feel something?) and on the other hand we have the violet-black combo. The shape itself is a completely simple brick, this is not the part which makes the K660i a hit, but the perfect contrasts have this effect. This green with this white is simply genial. To make the picture complete, a little chrome has also been used by the designers, so the overall impression is flawless.

At a first glance we of course observe the buttons. The navigational and function buttons placed in the green band have the usual layout, however the bright white area under these is equipped with round buttons, similar to those on the K810i. These little plastic things are completely easy to handle, I had only one problem and that was the backlight.

The whole white, Plexiglas-like panel dawns faintly in darkness, the buttons received a separate lighting; the K660i is really spectacular at such times. The only problem is that the labels near the buttons become invisible, so when writing a message it sometimes becomes hard to figure out where a character or the space key is. Of course for those who are used to the brand this won’t be a problem but for one who has just switched to Sony Ericsson will have some difficulties.

On the left side of the phone is the bay for the M2 card, on its right side we can find the volume buttons and the shortcut key for the camera. The system connector is now on the bottom, on the top of the handset there is only the power button. The neck-strap’s small ring has also been moved to the bottom. The whiteness of the back cover is dissolved with some circle shapes; in the middle of the largest one sits the camera, underneath which we find three small circles which help all sounds to reach the exterior.

Menu, basic functions

On the QVGA resolution, perfectly visible screen with a great contrast and brightness we can see the user interface characteristic of the manufacturer. The 12-icon main screen’s colors can be personalized with themes, the factory settings are quite good, a couple of them fit nicely with the exterior of the phone, I personally have been using the bright green one the most. The menu’s structure is based on a mature idea, which has been used for many years, everything is logical, those who have used a Sony Ericsson phone, won’t get lost in it.

Regarding basic functions, the situation is the usual, practically it’s copy-paste beginning from here T650i, only the renewed multimedia menu is worth to mention, however we have seen this in the W910i and a series of other models; we could practically run through the other functions by simply enlisting them. Our regular readers can simply click the conclusion at the end of the review, but we will, however, detail the most important information for the newbies.

The phone book with its capacity of 1000 names will surely be enough for a time especially because a contact can have a lot of other fields attached from the already known ones like email address, other phone numbers, photo, voice and groups. The layout is still based on tabs; the first column displays the most important information, while the others are for the least important ones. Upon first start-up this Sony Ericsson model also forces us to copy information from the SIM card to the phone’s internal memory.

The messaging system is no surprise either; we can of course easily create SMS and MMS messages, the latter can have a maximum size of 300KB. The built-in email client also does its job as it has to; it handles attachments and communicates with authenticated SMTP servers too. The list is made complete with the built-in RSS reader, whose importance is uncontestable for news-sensitive people like us.

The calendar’s month and week views are easy to handle; the alarm clock able to handle multiple wake-up times has a snooze time of 9 minutes for those who cannot pop out of bed like a budding tree. (I have once committed the mistake of telling in the morning my girlfriend of that time to pop out like a pimple. Of course she woke up immediately and never forgot this.) Besides the calculator there is a stopwatch, a countdown timer and a code memory – so we have the usual arsenal in means of organizer functions too.

Multimedia

The K550i and K770i are both Cyber-Shot models, but the K660i, situated halfway in means of model numbering, is not. In accordance the 2 megapixel camera peeping at the back of the phone has only fixed focus, moreover it has to take photos without the help of a flashlight, which can be observed in the quality of the pictures, especially in winter. The device – which should be held horizontally when taking pictures – has a fast viewfinder, exposition is immediate, the available functions and settings reach the level characteristic of the brand (size, quality, luminosity, environmental profiles, shutter), but unfortunately the K660i is a negative exception from the K series models. Test pictures can of course be viewed by clicking on the thumbnails below.

There are no big surprises in means of music, if we don’t count that although this is not a Walkman model, we still have the possibility to enable Megabass. By the way we have the same music player as in any other similar Sony Ericsson model. It would be a bit too rash to form an opinion of the enclosed earphone; probably a usual headset will be in the box which can be changed to a different one, in return for some money.

In this case the K660i won’t fall behind any random Walkman phone in means of sound quality, the renewed multimedia menu is present here too, we have landscape view, and the player can also run in this layout too. The songs are categorized by ID3 tags, there are shuffle and repeat playback modes too.

The RDS-enabled FM radio is also here, amongst the applications we have TrackID and Google Maps, which tries to localize us in this big world after connecting to the Internet. Theoretically it functions with an external Bluetooth GPS too, of course it won’t plan a trip or something like that, it just shows the spot where we are. In the games section we can find a tetris named QuadraPop, a Texan stunt game and a rollercoaster crap.

When on loudspeaker, the K660i is nothing great, though the tiny speaker is enough for playing the ringtones. Voice quality was flawless; the sound recorder can record calls too. Of course we can setup profiles – but this is not a surprise in case of a Sony Ericsson..

Data communication, battery

According to the manufacturer, the K660i is a primarily an Internet-phone. Muhaha. There will be truly no problems with speed if we have proper network coverage, since besides 3G the handset has HSDPA compatibility too, but surfing the net on our phone would really need some pleasant browser. Well, in case of the K660i the designers tried to focus on this, but they only tried to dress the already given functions in something nice.

The browser itself functions in landscape view too, but this is a function which has been already present on previous Sony Ericsson models, so we need not amazed. However near the 3-6-9-# buttons there are small icons, which are enlightened in green when browsing, these are used to ease use. With the help of the topmost, the URL text box opens up, which can be accessed through the options menu too. The second key (the 6) brings up the list of favorites, thank you. The icon near the 9 key shows that with this one we can return to the home page, while the bottom one shows that by pressing the hash mark key we can zoom. Practically this means that the site shrinks to page width, this way we can navigate through it; this can also be activated from the menu and is not a new feature either.

So, people, dear ladies and gentleman, my dear friends, this is why the K660i is an Internet-phone.

The battery beneath the back cover is a 950 mAh one, the phone has an online time of 3-4 days with this, although if we tamper much with it, this value starts to decrease rapidly. In a conclusion I can only repeat myself: unfortunately the K660i is the handset in which no signs of innovation can be discovered, the work of the designers is to be appreciated though, and that’s the end of the list of pros and things to pick out. Of course this is not a bad device, in my opinion it’s functions would be enough, however the users have the right to expect some extra in exchange for their money.

I can only hope that the year 2008 brings about a breakthrough at Sony Ericsson, as they are currently at the state that the Walkman series is slowly dying and losing its power and exclusivity, the Cyber-Shot doesn’t give anything more than the photo-phone of the competitors. The design is still okay, but this is a matter of taste and the menu system would slowly need a careful facelift. This won’t be enough, so we are keeping our fingers crossed for them to bring something new this year.