Sony Ericsson's new K700 UI

Editorial by Michael Oryl on Sunday April 25, 2004.

While photos of a new and yet-to-be-released handset are a good enough reason to run a story, I thought that I would offer up a bit more than just that for several reasons.

1) Sony Ericsson was nice enough to loan me a K700i for a couple of weeks.
2) The K700i is the first Sony Ericsson handset that will come to market with SE's 3rd major version of their color user interface.

If you are just interested in seeing photos of the phone itself, then just follow this link. But if you are interested in the new user interface and features in the phone, read on.

The changes in the UI are not all that major when looked at individually, but when looked at as a whole, they mark a major step in refinement. It appears to me that Sony Ericsson has put quite a lot of effort into looking for the little things that needed changing. While there is an obvious improvement in the quality of the graphical elements, I think it is the small non-graphical refinements that are most important.

Just a quick look at the new main menu will tell you that the UI has received a graphical overhaul. The new icons have a much more 3 dimensional look to them. There is also more animation at play. For example, when you move about the menu with the joystick you will see what appears to be a spot light moving from icon to icon (you can see it in the first photo below). As the spotlight reaches an icon, that icon grows in size to show that it is selected.

To me the change in size alone is a bit hard to detect without the aid of the spotlight. The spotlight turns off once it reaches its destination, so it isn't always easy to see where you are in the menu. Sure you can read which icon is selected by looking at the top of the display, but I think I would prefer that the spotlight remain on the icon at all times.

In any event, it all looks very pretty. As far as I can tell, though, diagonal movement is still not available. The spotlight's movement will wrap around from one side to the other in order to simplify things a bit.

Here you can see a spotlight like effect that moves across the screen from icon to icon as you use the joystick. You can also skip directly to an icon by using the keypad

(The text of the story continues on the following pages.)