Sony Ericsson K850i

Cool Yule rating: 3 stars

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Cool Yule rating: 3 stars

Price: $299.00 (Cellhut.com), $359.00-$399.00 (Amazon.com)

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Description: Carry it around and you will convince most people that you are carrying a camera. Turn it around and you have a cell phone with a large colorful screen. The menu portion at the bottom edge of the screen is touch-driven, which is very cool and definitely better than using the keypad. The phone has all features of a regular phone that manage contacts, pictures, music, video and applications. The coolest application is the FaceWrap. This lets you take pictures of anyone around you and the application automatically "facewraps" the face of the subject, making them look real funny (the insect face wrap made most of us look like Roswell aliens). My kids and I had loads of fun with this feature.

The camera function works just like a digital camera, just point and shoot for some great photos. Landscape orientation was much easier than portrait mode, although an auto-tilt feature automatically orients the picture to align to the position of the display.

The phone's Internet performance was very good. It was able to upload all of the photos I shot to my Yahoo account, as well as attaching photos to e-mails without having to resize them (although the phone prompts you to). The large 10MB-sized e-mail was sent out in about 5 minutes. I was unable to login to my Yahoo account through the phone, mainly because I didn't have a quick way of typing the underscore key in my e-mail address.

The keypad on the phone is a miniature version of a retro-style switchboard with little square keys. If you are accustomed to other cell phones with smooth buttons, this can take some time to get used to the relatively firm feel of these tiny squares that leave impressions on your thumb after prolonged use, especially in cold weather. With its raised edge design and very little surface area to thumb on, the joystick will leave you with a sense of lowered expectations. Unless you play a stringed instrument, you will soon begin to dislike the edges pressing into your thumb.

Using the phone's GPS feature was very tiring. I wouldn't recommend using this phone as a GPS, unless you have the time and patience to put in all your favorite locations using the not-so-convenient keypad, despite all its word prediction features the phone has to offer.

Other features I enjoyed was the flashlight, which can turn the phone into an emergency beam of light (including the ability to blink in SOS mode); and the FM radio tuner (although the earphone buds were uncomfortable).

Overall, the K850i is a much better camera than phone. There's no doubt that users can boast about the digital camera on the phone. It seems like Sony started with a camera and then glued a cell phone onto the back of it. This is not a phone for regular folk unless you have a tech whiz at your disposal to help you with it or have the time to spend on learning how to use it.

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