Sony Ericsson K660i

Editor's Review of the K660i

The Sony Ericsson K660i is a mid range 3G mobile phone with a pretty standard set of features. It looks good for a mobile phone in this price range but and for the rather low sim free price for a new mobile phone handset, it has a relatively strong set of features although there are a few things missing.

The Sony Ericsson K660i weighs in at a respectable 95g but at 104x47x15mm it is slightly larger than similar candy bar mobile phones. We really like all four colour schemes the phone comes in being Lime on White, Wine on Black, Cyan on Black and Silver on Black. Sony have managed to compromise between a functional and neat look as well as looking quite stylish and a lot of fun with the mix of colours on each version. That said, the Sony K660i doesn't exactly look like a business mobile phone handset.

On the front of the Sony Ericsson K660i is a 2 inch 262,000 colour TFT screen. We were impressed with the quality of the screen on the K660i, especially that it looks surprisingly clear in bright light. But considering the size of the handset, it the screen maybe could have been a little bigger. Beneath it are the navigation and menu keys that are raised slightly different amounts; a small design feature that makes it really comfortable to use. The number keypad is made of very small round keys. The fact that they're small makes them tricky to get used to, and if you have big fingers this won't be a phone of choice. However, they are well spaced out so some people will prefer the idea of smaller keys with spaces between rather than the standard Samsung and Nokia layout of larger keys with no spaces between. On the right hand edge of the handset is the well placed camera shutter button for taking photos whilst holding the camera in landscape format. To the right of the 3, 6, 9 and # keys are backlit shortcut symbols that show what the 3, 6, 9 and # keys can be used for when browsing the internet.

Speaking of the internet, this is an HSDPA phone with 3.5G browsing speeds. With the NetFront web browser, you'd think this would be a great contender. The K660i lets you browse the internet in landscape mode which is a great feature unless you need to type new addresses frequently. But the big let down is that the Sony Ericsson K660i clearly doesn't have the hardware power to fully support web browsing at HSDPA speeds, and it is therefore a bit slow to load and render some larger webpages, even though the actual file download speeds are the same as on other HSDPA handsets. Still, HSDPA for this price is something of a bargain, so most people will be able to put up with a slight amount of delay between pages. The Sony K660i also has RSS desktop widgets that display always-on RSS feeds without you having to go into any program on the phone; great for keeping up to date on the news as long as you have a data package with your mobile phone contract.

The camera on the Sony Ericsson K660i is a 2 megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom. But that's about it for the camera, it's OK, but it's nothing special. No flash, no autofocus. It does take 15fps videos but the quality is pretty poor there. However, Sony Ericsson have included a suite of fun photo and video editing tools that, although lacking in real practical usefulness, further enhance the fun gadget value of the K660i.

The Sony Ericsson K660i includes Sony's non-Walkman full suite of music playing capabilities along with TrackID for finding out the name of a track and artist from a short recording of a tune as well as MegaBass for enhanced bass during playback. You have to use the headphones that come with the handset though as there is no 3.5mm socket, or you can use your own bluetooth headphones to listen to music. The K660i even comes with a 256MB M2 card and with these coming in sizes up to 8GB, this could potentially be a primary MP3 player if you don't mind using the Sony Ericsson headphones.

Call quality on the Sony K660i was perfect and video call quality was as good as it ever is. Sony Ericsson quote an impressive battery life of 9 hours talktime on GSM networks although this drops for HSDPA calling and is unsurprisingly less for video calling and other heavy duty activities. All the same, these are impressive figures along with a standby time of 330 hours. The K660i is even quad band so it can be used in any country that your network supports.

We like the Sony Ericsson K660i. Both the colour scheme and the type of keypad make this a perfect phone for some people and a bad purchase for others. We would have liked to see autofocus on the phone and a more powerful processor to support the web browsing but apart from the K660i is a great mobile phone handset in its class.