3GSM 2006: hands on with the Sony Ericsson K610

The first big handset out of the blocks at 3GSM proved to be the K610 from Sony Ericsson. You can check out the basic spec here, however we did pop over to the stand and managed to grab a few minutes with it.

First up it is as billed, very slight for a 3G phone. The chocolate bar style handset is skinny and very light, though still significantly chunkier than say Moto’s SLVR. The trade off in size means that the keys are small and a little fiddly especially the menu buttons at the top. The 262k screen is as you’d expect top notch and the images stored on the phone looked superb. The phone also sports an RSS reader integrated into its messaging section. No one at the SE stand knew a great deal about how this works, but loading RSS feeds appears a pretty simple process of just inputting an URL and grabbing the feed.

No one knew how many RSS feeds you can actually load. The phone is also compatible with push email with the option of the specific system apparently left to the operator, and it also has what SE bills as a mobile blogging solution built in. I wasn’t blown away by it as I was by the M600 last week, but this is solid mid market 3G fare and should do well for the company. I expect it will be grabbed by most UK networks.