At the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona this year Sony Ericsson announced two new CyberShot branded phones and in the process changed the CyberShot branding prefix from K (as in K850i) to C (C902). This left us wondering if the K prefix may get recycled to mean something new. If the K660i is indicative of this change, maybe K now means phones for kids.

Design
If the lime and white colour scheme didn’t give away the target market for this phone then the lanyard clip at the bottom of the handset confirmed our suspicions. The K660i is a cheap-to-mid range phone designed to appeal to a youth market.

Our first impressions of the K660i were not strong. The handset is a simple looking Sony Ericsson candy-bar with a two-inch QVGA colour display. Below the screen and navigation buttons are tiny circular numeric keys, each about the size of M&M minis (you know, the tiny little ones). While this isn’t the most attractive keypad design we’ve seen, it’s certainly easy to use.

At 15mm the K660i is thicker than we’d like, especially for a low-spec phone, given Sony Ericsson’s previous success with super-slim styled handsets. On the left-hand side of the phone you’ll find an M2 memory stick slot, which is great for hot-swapping memory, and on the bottom of the handset is the combined charging and headphone port. Sony Ericsson bundle a 256MB memory card with the handset, which is generous for a phone in this price range.

Features
It seems a cruel irony that while the K660i has HSDPA, other phones designed with Web browsing in mind don’t have similarly fast data speeds (we’re looking squarely at you iPhone). Call us cynics, but the only reason you put HSDPA in a phone marketed at kids is to sell music downloads.

That said, the K660i does have a few nice Web-focused features. The four keys on the right side of the numeric pad (3,6,9 and #) are browser shortcuts for bookmarks, search entry, page zooming and a shortcut to Sony Ericsson’s “Fun and Downloads” site. These shortcuts definitely come in handy for speedy surfing. The pre-installed NetFront browser is apparently Web 2.0/xHTML compatible, however our experience suggested that the K660i is only adequate for browsing mobile sites; we encountered some difficulty with page rendering on some standard sites we tried to access, and the small screen makes reading long, wide pages tiresome even when using the nifty zoom tool.

The K660i also features a 2-megapixel camera on the back, with a self-portrait mirror, but no flash or auto-focus. We tested the camera outside on a beautiful, sunny day and took some very nice photos. Quick processing helps keep the focus sharp and free of movement blur, and the colour reproduction was bright and true. Later in the day though, without a flash, the camera struggled to perform to the same high standard.

Performance
Parents who may be considering this phone for their kids will be happy to know that the basics are in place. During our tests we constantly saw strong reception and voice calls sounded loud and clear.

Similarly comforting is the K660i’s battery life; between three and four days during our tests, which is good for a phone with an HSDPA chipset. This should mean that kids will have enough charge to make a call wherever they may be.

Like all Sony Ericsson phones, the K660i includes a decent media player and Walkman-esque media browser. It’s hard to ascertain whether the K660i features the same audio hardware as a Walkman branded phone, however, the music we played sounded good through the bundled headphones; nice clear audio with decent bass.

Accessing menus is pleasingly fast, with only momentary lag between selecting a menu item and having it appear on screen. We did see considerable lag when accessing certain graphics-heavy Web sites, and this is more than likely due to a less-than-ideal processor than with network speeds.

Overall
The K660i seems like a tricky pitch for Sony Ericsson. Its feature set resembles a basic, pre-paid model phone with the addition of HSDPA. The question is: does the targeted youth market want or need fast Web on their phones? Adding a popular instant messaging client would have made the answer to that question simpler.

In the past we’ve found Sony Ericsson’s budget range to be very good, such as with the S500i, and while the K660i performs as well as the S500i in terms of voice and texting, it certainly doesn’t match the S500i in terms style or sex appeal. Perhaps we’re being overly fashion conscious, but we think sex appeal will prove to be more important than speedy Web browsing to this market.

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