Sony Ericsson K550i Review

The Sony Ericsson K550i is an absolute scorcher of a phone. It was good value at launch, but now you can find it at incredibly low prices. This phone gets 6 out of 5 for value for money!

The K550i is the upgraded version of the popular K510i, but it's massively more powerful, borrowing many features from Sony Ericsson's flagship K800i Cyber-Shot phone. The camera is simply the best in its class. It's a 2 megapixel camera with a photo light and digital zoom, that includes the autofocus feature first found in the K800i. Instead of a fixed focus camera, with autofocus you can ensure that the subject of your photo is firmly in focus, leading to noticeably sharper images. With Sony being a world leader in digital camera technology, it's no surprise to learn that the K550i takes the best photos of any mid-range camera that we've reviewed to date. In fact it beats many phones that cost a lot more. The K550i features "picture blogging" - take a picture and send it straight to your own image blog for friends and family to view. There's also a good quality video camera.

The phone delivers on the music front too. It includes an FM radio as well as a music player. Sound quality is excellent, as you'd expect from the company that makes the top-selling Walkman range of music phones. The K550i is compatible with stereo headphones and Bluetooth wireless stereo headsets - both are available as optional accessories from Sony Ericsson. A very welcome feature is the generous amount of internal memory (64 Mbytes - enough for about a dozen songs) and the support for a Memory Stick Micro™ card, available in sizes up to 2 Gbytes. As with the Walkman phones, the K550i is equipped with two useful music features: TrackID™ & PlayNow™. TrackID lets you record a few seconds of a song, and then get the track, artist and album information sent directly to your phone. PlayNow is a service for downloading music and games to your phone (you have to pay for these.)

Available in a choice of black or white, the K550i is a compact and lightweight phone that looks very attractive (it's much less of a brick than the K800i for example). The buttons are smaller than most Sony Ericssons, but are not so difficult to use as they are well spaced out and project a millimetre or so above the surface of the phone. However, they do have a tendency to stick. The display is a good quality TFD LCD screen that retains good visibility in sunlight and is of a high resolution. At 176 x 220 pixels, it isn't as fine as the display on the K800i, but it's double the number of pixels of the K510i and is as good as anything in this price range.

Other useful features worth mentioning are the built-in speakerphone, sound recorder (for recording voices or other sounds), quadband support (for using the phone worldwide) and flight mode. There's good internet support too: EDGE for fast downloads, a web browser, and support for blogging and RSS feeds. Battery life is good.

We are impressed by the K550i. It's a great value for money phone that really offers more than it should! If only Sony Ericsson had put in a decent keypad it would be perfect!