The era of the celebrity phone is upon us – not phones owned by celebrities, but phones that take on celebrity-like personas of their own. Razrs, iPhones, BlackBerrys, every manufacturer now pushes a flagship model with a boatload of sophisticated features, flashy styling, and price tags to match. If you have the money, the Ferraris and Porsches of the phone world will do it all, and look good doing it.
Fortunately, for those who crave celebrity phones without celebrity budgets, their features and styles tend to trickle down into more affordable phones, which is exactly what Sony Ericsson has managed to do with its K660i. Not a lowly entry-level phone, not a super-phone, the K660i captures many of the high-end features found a notch higher on the totem pole and packages them into more practical phone being marketed toward young people.
Images Courtesy of Sony Ericsson
For starters, the K660i borrows the classic candybar styling that nearly all Sony Ericsson phones now tout. It has a rounded rectangular profile that measures just 4 inches long, 1.8 inches wide, and a hair over half an inch thick. The relatively petite keypad on its face makes room for a 240 x 320 pixel screen that can be used normally when making, or tilted 90 degrees in a landscape view for Web browsing. The whole package weighs 95 grams, about as much as the Motorola Razr V3.
Functionally, the biggest selling point for the K660i is its high-speed HSDPA Internet capabilities. While it can obviously be used for Web browsing, the phone can make use of its connection in other ways as well, such as streaming video, downloading RSS feeds, e-mailing and instant messaging. For areas where HSDPA service isn’t available, it can also use an EDGE Internet connection.
The included 2-megapixel digital camera snaps digital photos and captures video that can be immediately uploaded to your blog of choice, cutting out the PC middleman. Other features include TrackID, which will identify the song name, artist and album from a clip of music, as well as PictBridge, which allows photos to be sent directly to a compatible printer.
For cell phone users who require a more full-featured phone but won’t be shelling out for an iPod anytime soon, the K660i may represent the magic balance. Sony Ericsson has not yet released the price of the phone, but we can reasonably expect it to be much cheaper than its big brother, the $449 USD W660i. The K660i will ship in the first quarter of 2008.
