28 September 2006 0:00 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Sony Ericsson is hoping that the K800i complete with its Sony Cyber-Shot branding can dominate the camera phone market in the same way its Walkman branded handsets have dominated the music phone arena.

The main crux of the phone is, as you might expect, the 3.2 megapixel digital camera on its rear and Sony Ericsson has geared the phone's design to emphasise to its users that it's there at the forefront rather than as an afterthought.

Covered by a somewhat bulky lens cover, the phone offers shutter and zoom buttons on the side of the handset and a 2-inch landscape screen to encourage its users to snap as you would a camera rather than the somewhat traditional upright way found on most mobile phone handsets.

Slide the cover down and the camera element of the phone springs into action (somewhat annoying if it's in your pocket) and taking a picture is very easy with plenty of options such as adjusting the white balance. Once snapped you are presented with a number of options including in-phone editing or sending to another device via Bluetooth, MMS or email and the phone comes 64MB of internal memory and the chance to expand that further with a Memory Stick Micro (M2) slot.

However, the most interesting of features in the ability to "Blog" the image direct from the camera using its second great selling point: it's 3G connection.

Pressing the "Blog This" option on the menu allows you to send the image, a title and text to a Blogger.com account blog and means that theoretically you could blog without the need of a computer altogether, however unless your texting skills are pretty impressive, it may take you some time.

Once submitted the phone sends the data (it took a couple of seconds via the 3G connection) and then another couple of seconds later it's online for the world to see - we were very impressed.

Failing the online sharing the phone also offers PictBridge compatibility making this suitable for printing directly to a photo printer just as you do with a digital camera.

Get past the camera elements of the phone and the K800i still manages to offer plenty of features that are useful to the multimedia fan. For those who like to keep in touch with the world, the RSS reader allows you to access your favourite feeds, including Pocket-lint, on the go and a VideoDJ application that allows you to edit videos you've recorded are amongst the features worth writing home about.

Couple that with a web browser, MP3 player and a range of games makes the 3G capable K800i a phone worth looking at.

Of course it's not all win, win, win and the main grumbles we had were that there was no locking catch for the lens cover - strange when you consider the lock keypad option to be so quick - we were forever having to press the unlock option before doing anything even if the phone had already been in our hand.

Verdict

Sony Ericsson has created a camera phone that uses Sony's CyberShot branding perfectly, creating great pictures and then backing up those great pictures with features such as 3G connectivity and good solid design.

It might be a tad bulky (105 x 47 x 22mm) compared to other regular phones available, however for us we would be happy to have this as our main phone.

We would even go as far to say that if we ran Pocket-lint via the Blogger software and our texting skills where up to scratch, we would be filing this from the beach rather than in the office.

Score

Review Recap

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Sony

Price as reviewed

£price dependent on contract

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The good

Camera, 3G connectivity, Blogger app, solid build

The bad

Camera lens cover, no external memory card included, keypad lock is very quick to turn on

Quick verdict

It might be a tad bulky compared to other phones available, however we would be happy to have this as our main phone

Score

Winner

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