Pocket Picks :: The coolest things for the coolest phones

Sony Ericsson last night revealed two of the most exciting phones we’ve seen for a while: the new K850i five-megapixel Cyber-shot camera phone (prototype name ‘Sofia‘), and a music playing monster, the W960, which comes with 8GB of on-board storage — more on that in a separate post.

The K850i Cyber-shot, shown right, boasts 5MP image resolution, autofocus, 16x digital zoom, an auto-retracting lens cover, and a xenon flash. This is a fairly serious digital snap camera; you can take nine-shot bursts of images then select the best one; there’s built-in image correction editing software; and the main keypad icons illuminate to show shortcuts while in camera mode. You get a 512MB Memory Stick M2 card with the phone, with capacities up to 2GB supported.

For more on the rather attractive K850, including a huge pic, hit the jump.

Other notable K850i features include HSDPA high-speed 3G support which, as Sony Ericsson says, should make moblogging those 5MP camera shots a bit easier. The phone sports a 2.2″ QVGA (240 x 320 pixel) screen, which is okay but for that kind of camera rez we’d have liked to have seen SE move the game on a bit — especially given the kind of screens that feature on high-end phones in the Far East.

Browsing images is enhanced by a new media browser that can be searched by date, thumbnails or full-screen previews. All media on the phone is now organised via this centralised media browser, accessed from a single menu icon. The interface is based on the Symbian UIQ system.

Push-email is supported via Microsoft’s Active Sync, which is a new initiative from SE. There’s also FM radio — but with RDS (the scrolling info text you see on your car radio with the station name), which is cool. On-board memory is 40MB, so you’re definitely going to need that M2 card. Talktime is claimed up to nine-hours on GSM radio, with standby up to 400 hours.

This is one damned well-loaded phone…