New Shiny

My new phone arrived yesterday, I'm quite pleased with it.

First of all the basics. It's a d750i which is a development of my old k700i. I'm pretty brand loyal with phones and while most of the world seems to be Nokia fans I've generally found Sony-Ericsson phones capable (and geek friendly). The basic layout is much the same although navigation is snappier indicating more processor power. Even Java doesn't suck!

A couple of welcome additions include a more sturdy connector for the hands free kit as well improvements to the Radio. The FM tuner is now RDS aware and seems to be more resilient picking up more stations than the k700 did. The volume the radio is capable of seems to be better as well (unless this mornings metro was a quite one). They lose marks for using the proprietary Sony Memory Stick Duo format although it is nice to have a way to boost the phones memory.

The thing I'm most pleased with is the built in camera. I've never been a fan of the concept of phone camera's. I generally regarded them (and the associated MMS photo messaging) as rather gimmicky. However the quality of the images on the 2.0 mega-pixel camera is quite good. Instead of the fixed lense the camera will focus. It has several shoot modes including a rapid 4 in a row mode that gives you more chance of catching a good picture in rapidly moving action. Most importantly the lense is covered so you don't have to clean the lint from your pocket off the lense before you take a photo. It's certainly entering the quick snap capable territory that means I'd be comfortable using it instead of a "real" digital camera.

This of course means the next real camera I get will have to be a decent SLR style digital ;-)