As planned, I got a K800i earlier this week, and it’s taken me the best part of the week to try and sort out all of the different elements. I already did a quick post on Convergence in mobile phones with the SE K800i at ComputerWorld, but I thought it would be worth looking at some of the other elements.
With Mac OS X, it doesn’t take much work to get everything set up, but it has taken me a while to sort out and organize some of the more fun elements. Getting the phone syncing with my address book was achieved using the plugin available from feisar.com.
To populate the audio so that I can use it for what I used to employ the iPod shuffle for, I used iTunes to create 128Kbps AAC files; when you connect the camera through the supplied USB cable, the Memory Stick Micro card appears on the desktop just like a USB thumb drive - so you can copy the files (including the folders) over so you can play them. Playback through the headphones is great. Through the built-in speaker, it’s good enough to use in a small room for some ambient noise. My only problem now is remembering to pick up the headphones each time I leave.
I’ve also set up the email for the phone so that I can pick up emergency messages on the phone when away from the office. The phone has it’s own email address (technically it has two, my own and one provided by the mobile phone operator (O2)), and I’ve set up some rules within sieve to forward specific types of message to the phone.
As I hoped (and to be honest, expected) the quality of the camera is superb, and I love the way you can use this to blog directly just by pressing a button (you can see the results and quality at Martin MC Brown’s Mobile Blog. OK, so I might be late to the whole mobile blogging thing, but honestly, it works so great that my mother could be doing this.
The camera itself works just like a Sony camera - you get the same controls, zoom, built in flash, auto-focus and you can set a full range of options, like metering mode, white balance and selected special photo subjects with corresponding optimized settings. The results are obviously less expansive than those on my Sony P200, but definitely a good range given that we are talking about the camera built into a mobile phone.
Having said for years I was never going to get a mobile phone with a built in camera, I can now imagine a situation where the walks to the post office or those ever-so-rare cat shots suddenly become possible (nay, necessary) when I can publish them straight to the blog from the phone.
Expect more photos and experience notes as I get to use the camera more. Afterall, I’m still yet to actually make or receive a phone call!