By Michell Bak, 3rd of May 2008

The Sony Ericsson K660 is a stylish web phone targeted at the youth. K660 impresses with speedy internet connection possibilities, a bold design and choice of colour, as well an attractive price tag. This is a traditional Sony Ericsson phone - which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Official product pictures of the Sony Ericsson K660

Advantages

• Cool front design and bold choice of colour combinations
• HSDPA support (3.6 Mpbs) as well as quad-band GSM with EDGE
• Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR
• FM radio with RDS support
• Positioning services with Google Maps pre-loaded
• NetFront 3.4 with enhanced functionality; cursor and full page view zoom
• Very affordable

Disadvantages

• Small display for web browsing
• Camera is not suitable for prints
• Creaking soft keys
• The front & backside are fingerprint magnets
• The backside feels a bit cheap

The K660 looks like a traditional Sony Ericsson phone, even though it’s a bit wider than most Sony Ericsson phones. Apart from that, there is also the question whether or not the bold colour combination is suitable for a “traditional Sony Ericsson phone”. Sony Ericsson’s colour combinations are becoming more and more untraditional compared to what they were a few years ago. Being that this is the case, I’d say that the colour combination on K660 is on the edge of being traditional. The K660 has no direct predecessors, but has a large resemblance with the newly announced G502 & Z770.

The K660 sales package is a tiny box, and it’s amazing how Sony Ericsson managed to get the bundled accessories in it. It was definitely almost impossible for me to get it all back in. Along with the K660 comes a 256 MB M2 memory card, a HPM-62 stereo headset, a USB-cable, a charger and the mandatory load of manuals and of course the applications CD.

It’s bold and cheerful

The K660 is a stylish candy bar phone with rounded edges and a glossy front. The sharp 2-inch large TFT display is capable of showing up to 262.144 colours, and is semi-visible in direct sunlight. Indoors, colours are very nicely saturated and the display is very bright. The K660 is marketed as being a web phone, so I definitely wouldn’t mind a larger display.

The K660 keypad consists of 12 alphanumeric circle keys that are quite comfortable to press. The keys are nicely spaced, so I didn’t have any problems using it. The soft keys and option keys, however, are placed a bit too close to each other, and they’re quite creaky. The four alphanumeric keys on the right also light up and double as short cuts in the web browser, which is quite nice.

K660 measures 104 x 47 x 15 millimetres, and tips the scales at about 95 grams. It’s actually feels a bit lighter than what I’d expected. Its size is acceptable, and it fit my pockets perfectly. The K660 is available in four colour variants; Cyan on Black, Lime on White, Silver on Black & Wine on Black (this is the colour of the review unit). I personally like the Lime on White & Silver on Black variants.

The backside of the K660 is quite plain. The background material is matt plastic, which feels surprisingly good, although it’s a fingerprint magnet. The 2 mega pixel camera is on the backside, and so is the mediocre loud speaker.

The left side of the phones holds the Memory Stick Micro slot, and nothing else, while the right side plays host to the camera shutter key and volume keys. The sides are of the same material as the back, which gives you a good grip of the phone.

On the top of the phone you’ll find the power button, while the Fast Port connector, microphone and a lanyard eyelet are at the bottom of the phone.

The battery is a BST-38 battery that should last up to 330 hours in standby mode or up to 9 hours of talk on a GSM network, or about half of that on a 3G network. The battery in the phone lasted for about 4 days of normal use, which is acceptable.

Beautiful themes!

The K660 is one of the first cheaper phones to make use of the A2 software platform by Enea. The A2 platform is quite snappy, it looks great and it adds lots of functionality to the phone.

The K660 comes with 5 pre-installed themes, and they are honestly some of the most beautiful ones I’ve ever seen. The creators really did a nice job there. The themes are; Amethyst, Clarity, Connectoid, Digitize & Gossamer. My personal favourite was definitely Digitize, and then Connectoid, but the others aren’t bad at all either.

Three of the themes substitute the standard menu with a new one in Flash, each specifically created for that certain theme. All menu layouts are based on a 3 x 4 grid of icons.

The user interface is quite user friendly, and most people will get the hang of the system within a very short period of time. The three soft keys are used for various actions on the phone. The soft keys, however, are no more used for calls, as two new dedicated call keys have been added in the A2 software infrastructure.

The activity menu is still present, and it’s a brilliant feature of Sony Ericsson’s feature phones. It’s basically a pop-up window with various event informations, i.e. messages, missed calls & alarms, handling of running applications & games, application shortcuts as well as Internet bookmarks and Google search features. All of that is located in a single menu, you can reach by pressing a key on the phone.

The K660 is no different than any other A2-powered phones when it comes to default applications and software features. It delivers the same amount of high quality applications, such as Location Services (with Google Maps), Media application, calendar, alarms, advanced file manager, remote synchronization (Exchange ActiveSync), and so on. I’d suggest you to read about this in my W890 review or check out the screenshots below.

It’s a snap’n’share!

Let’s face it - the K660 camera is far from the best we’ve seen from Sony Ericsson. It’s a mediocre 2 mega pixel CMOS camera with a fixed focus. While it is quite good at dealing with low-light situations, it still lacks at least an LED flash. You can use zoom (not in full size mode) while taking a picture, but keep in mind that it’s digital zoom, and it does nothing more than crops your picture.

The revamped camera interface of the A2 software platform is easy to use, and it’s easy on the eye as well. It’s not lightening fast when going through the settings, but luckily you can use a few keypad short cuts for some selected features, such as self timer and night mode.

The settings menu will give you the ability to set the following;

• Shoot mode - Normal, Panorama, Frames & Burst
• Picture size - 2 MP (1600 x 1200 pixels), 1 MP (1280 x 960 pixels) & VGA (640 x 480 pixels)
• Night mode - Off & On
• Self-timer - Off & On
• White balance - Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Fluorescent & Incandescent
• Effects - Off, Black & white, Negative & Sepia
• Settings - Picture quality (Fine & Normal), Review (On & Off), Save to (Mem. card & Phone mem.), Auto rotate (On & Off), Shutter sound (Sound 1, Sound 2, Sound 3, Sound 4 & Off) & Reset counter.

The lack of some certain settings compared to other phones is due to the lack of auto focus in the camera.

Let’s move on, and see how the camera performs in various situations. Press the thumbnails for full size samples.

You will rarely end up with snaps that are poorly saturated with the K660. However, due to its lack of auto focus, the photos aren’t always that sharp and nice looking. I noticed a strange problem with the K660 on the first photos I did with it - semi-transparent yellow lines down across the photos, as visible on the fifth photo. Another thing is that there are a few minor problems with the white balance, which is clearly visible on the last sample photo.

K660 does video recordings as well. They’re encoded in MP4 format in a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels. The frame rate is about 15 frames per seconds. The video bit rate is about 400 Kbps, which is OK. The video quality is expectable - nothing ground-breaking, but it isn’t bad either. You can check out a video sample below, or download it here. QuickTime is required to watch the video below.

Your recent snaps can easily be accessed by changing from camera mode to preview mode. I find the photo viewer very good, and it’s loaded with brilliant features, like X-Pict Story - a cool slide show application with mood settings, effects, transitions and sounds. Another nice feature is photo tagging - by tagging your photos, you’ll always know where they are, and it’ll be faster getting to them. If you don’t like that sort of sorting, then you should be happy to know that the K660 also automatically sorts your photos by month.

Suitable for music

Although the K660 only comes with a 256 MB memory card, it still packs one of the best mobile music players - the Walkman 3.0 player without the branding and gimmick features. The music player is extremely easy to find your way round in, and it’s graphically stunning as well.

The K660 will support most common audio codecs, such as M4A, MP3, AAC, AAC+, E-AAC+, WAV & WMA. You can set equalizers to enhance your music (4 presets and the option to manually set the equalizer). The K660 will display the album cover art, if any, or you can set it to display an animation instead. The player can be used in both portrait and landscape mode, but you’ll have to manually change the mode.

The K660 audio quality is quite good. It’s not at the same level as the W890, which I recently reviewed, but it seems to be on par with the K850. The loud speaker is among the best Sony Ericsson has ever created, so I’ve got to give them props for that.

If your music collection should ever end up boring you, you’re in luck - the K660 has a built-in FM-radio tuner, so you can listen to the radio with a headset plugged in. Up to 20 radio frequencies can be automatically found and stored, and K660 supports RDS, so there’s no risk of ever losing the radio channel, even if it changes the frequency.

TrackID is a unique feature of most new Sony Ericsson phones. It works by recording a short sample of the radio (or music), sends it to Gracenote’s database, and returns with song details - all within seconds. Depending on your operator, there may even be a link to buy the song. It’s amazing how well this works!

Screenshots from W890

Funny games

The K660 comes with three games pre-installed. These are JC Does Texas, Roller Coaster Rush 3D & QuadraPop. I’m not a big fan of QuadraPop, but the other two games are excellent.

JC Does Texas is another game in the Johnny Crash-series, this time doing Texas. Johnny Crash is a stunt man, and the object of the game is to fire him through a cannon, and then steer him in the air, hitting various objects. It’s quite easy, and took me about an hour to complete.

Roller Coaster Rush 3D has been one of my favourite mobile games, ever since it was released. It’s a 3D game with nice looking graphics, and it runs quite smoothly on the K660. The object of the game is to control a set of coaster wagons, and make sure the people on them are having fun, but don’t get hurt.

QuadraPop is a bit like tetris, and I find it quite boring. The blocks have changed from being musical instruments to being sea objects, such as starfish and crabs. It’s easy to play, but I’m afraid many will get sick of it after a short while.

Does web 2.0

K660 is a Quad-band GSM phone with EDGE, UMTS 2100 & HSDPA 2100 (3.6 Mbps) support. You can transfer files wirelessly with Bluetooth (version 2.0 + EDR), which supports transfer speeds upto about 140 KB/s. If you’re a music fanatic, you can stream your music wirelessly, as the K660 also supports the A2DP Bluetooth profile for stereo audio streaming.

K660 supports USB 2.0, and data transfers are quick and smooth in USB mass storage mode. There is no infrared connection on this phone (but who uses this?).

Screenshots from W890

K660 is marketed as a web phone, and with the built-in Access NetFront 3.4 web browser it does a good job. NetFront 3.4 has been significantly improved compared to other phones. It seems faster, and there is now a mouse cursor and whole page view feature, which makes it a lot easier to navigate the webpages. There is no support for Flash, but some light Java scripts are supported.

Once you open up the web browser for the first time, everything will be in landscape mode. This is by far the best way to browse the web, as it makes use of the full display in width. On the home page, which can be customized, is a Google search feature, some various information about your RSS feeds and recent visits, as well as links to Sony Ericsson services; one being the m-buzz music store.

Generally, the K660 does a good job in mobile web browsing, and it does a fair job on websites that aren’t too complex. The browser isn’t as advanced as other browsers - as always, I’d recommend installing either Opera Mini or TeaShark, if you want the optimal web experience on your Sony Ericsson feature phone.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to set up my email accounts on the K660. It supports both IMAP4 and POP3 protocols. It should also be possible to attach large files, and receive these files on the phone, but again, I didn’t manage to try that out.

Phonebook works great

You can save up to 1000 contacts on the K660, or a total of 7000 telephone numbers. Personally, I don’t think I’d ever get close to 1000 contacts, but I guess a few people will need this amount of memory.

You can store various information about each contact. This includes numerous different types of telephone numbers, email addresses, website, name, picture, special ring tone, work and private related informations about postal address, title and so on. Finally there’s also the option to add a date for the contact’s birthday - this date can then be put in the calendar and the phone will remind you that the contact’s birthday is coming up. It’s such a brilliant feature, which I’ve found useful on quite a few occasions.

Just like other A2-based phones, the K660 supports the Smart Search feature. Imagine you’d have to go through a list of hundreds of contacts just to find one number - did I see you shiver? No need to do that! If I were to find my contact entry in the phone book, I’d simply have to type “6, 4″ for “M, i” and my entry would pop up as well as other entries where this number combination fits (this could be Michael, Nick, etc.). It also works with telephone numbers, so if you were to find the number “123456789″, you could simply type in “1, 2″ and it would pop up.

Screenshot from W890

I freakin’ love the phonebook!

Messages

Both MMS and SMS messages can be composed on the K660. It is also possible to create a voice message. The MMS and SMS editors are simply superb, bringing all the latest features, including EMS support, smilies & formatting, to the user. This is one of the areas where Sony Ericsson is miles ahead of every single other competitor. Not only is the editor superb, so is the T9 dictionary with the largest set of words. If it should happen that a word is not in the dictionary, you can add it yourself, for the phone to remember.

Last screenshots from W890

A few MMS & SMS templates are on the phone and you can of course add your own. Messages can be saved on either the phone memory or the memory card.

As always, you have a nice amount of messaging settings to set and play round with. Personally, I always enable the “request answer” feature, which will automatically ask the receiver to answer.

Calls & calls management

The sound quality during calls is quite good. It’s loud and clear, with only very little background noise. You can put it on speaker if you want other people to listen as well, or if you’re simply doing something else while talking on the phone.

Screenshot from W890

You can manage your calls on the phone and set the various call settings like speed dialling. The call list holds the last 30 calls. However, if you’ve called a contact more than once, only the most recent call details will be displayed.

Conclusion

To be honest, I wasn’t that thrilled about the K660 at first. Sure, it seemed like a nice mid-end phone, but there was nothing spectacular about it. Boy, was I wrong! K660 is as unique as anything else, and the design has most definitely speaks a statement.

The K660 impresses me the most in terms of software. The A2 platform is brilliant, and putting it in a phone like K660, just goes to prove that it’s versatile. The phone was stable as a rock - no sudden restarts, no freezes, no nothing.

The price of the K660 is excellent. In Denmark, they retail at about £145 unlocked. For this price you get a decent mid-end phone with HSDPA, a 2 mega pixel camera, a crisp display and the wonderful A2 software platform.

The battery life is definitely acceptable. Four days between a charge is something other manufacturers can learn a thing or two about.

When it comes down to it the K660 offers a decent feature set at an attractive price tag. This phone is ideal for youngsters, who’d like a phone that impresses.

[Review based on firmware revision R1EA030]