Following on the success of Sony Ericsson’s Walkman music mobiles comes another assault into Sony’s brand vault - the Cyber-shot camera phone.

This shows incredibly good thinking on the company’s behalf, for while the Cyber-shot brand doesn’t quite have the same resonance in the digital camera market that the Walkman has for portable music, it still has a ring of quality to it.

As does the first handset in the range, the K800, which we were lucky enough to briefly get our grubby mitts onto at the launch event.

First impressions were very, very good, and while we initially scoffed at the idea of leaving our holiday memories in the hands of a phone rather than a camera we left thinking that we could be convinced. Or that we might not panic if we only had one of these in our pocket when we came through passport control.

The headline feature here is obviously the 3.2 megapixel resolution, which is way up there with digital cameras from a couple of years ago, and well up to printing on standard 6x4 paper. The 2-inch 262k colour LCD display also appeared to do the business, although we were indoors and would like to see how it performs in the bright sunshine.

On the software side, we loved the BestPic mode, which promises to banish the days of missing the moment. It constantly takes images as soon as you auto-focus the K800, and lets you choose between the four before you press the shutter release, the four after, and the moment you actually do the deed. We even got beyond our irritation at constantly being told that we could take pictures from the past (!), to actually agree that this is a good feature.

There were some things missing though, most notably a Carl Zeiss lens, which is a hallmark of Cyber-shot cameras, and has actually appeared on the Nokia N90 camera phone - very strange. This is bad news because anyone that’s played with digital cameras knows that megapixels are only a part of the story when it comes to images quality.

Key features :

* A 3.2 megapixel Cyber-shot™ camera with autofocus
* Xenon flash
* Integrated image blogging support
* Memory card slot with hot swap functionality
* 3G support with video calls
* Great MP3 player
* FM radio with RDS
* Infrared port
* Bluetooth stereo support (A2DP)
* Multi-tasking support

Main disadvantages:

* A bit oversized
* Somewhat uncomfortable keypad design
* No EDGE or Wi-Fi support (K790 has EDGE, but no 3G)
* Records video in ancient QCIF (176 x 144 pixels) resolution only
* Memory Stick Micro™ (M2™) card type is still very new and unpopular

Price : BDT: 25,000