Only every twelve months do I upgrade my phone, so it is truly a ‘special’ delivery when the postman arrives with a little white note and a pen asking for my autograph.

This is the first time I haven’t really thought long and hard about which phone came next, I’d resigned to the fact that Sony Ericsson tend to make fantastic mobiles, and so plumped for the highest spec one they do in what I call the ‘work’, and they call the ‘K’ series. I don’t know what the K stands for, but much like CYMK, it doesn’t really matter as long as you know it’s important (the K in CMYK stands for Key actually).

I approached my contract renewal with the sole aim to keep my bill down yet gain as many minutes as possible. I have therefore, ended up on an 18 month contract for the first time. No iPhone for me anytime soon I predict.

The fact is, I only really buy phones for two reasons (excluding phone calls, obviously). The first is the camera. I could have gone for the N95 with all it’s bells and whistles, but even the owners who really should love the thing can’t say much nice about it. Much like Cameron Diaz in a chastity belt; everything you could ever desire is inside, but it’s just so damn hard to get at.

At the moment, 5 megapixels is king (that is unless you want to spend the GDP of a small African nation on a handset). As a person who in 2003 used to parade around with a 5MP camera as the greatest thing I ever bought whilst most people were still asking what ‘digital’ was, I feel slightly wary of my newest purchase. After all, it’s only 3.3 megapixels less than my DSLR, and in the 12 months since I bought my last phone we’ve gained 1.8MP on the previous version.

Anyway, I digress. Five million dots was the lowest I was going to settle for, so if it was going to be a Sony, it had to be this model.

The second major feature I need is synchronicity. My Mac’s, my phone - they both have to mirror all of my contact details for reasons including theft, loss and the knowledge that everyone I know is contactable no matter how drunk I am or what time it is.

Well all modern phones have that feature these days (Bluetooth), but the calendar and contact updating always impressed me on my W800i and K800i previously, so no reason to change what works.

So, I made a blind purchase. The guy on the phone offered me a deal I couldn’t refuse and although I’d never seen anything but a photo of the thing, I knew it was the handset for me.

Well, I may have been a little naive in not having a proper play beforehand. Although on the whole it is a very nice Sony Ericsson from the same mould as it’s two predecessors, it does lack a little in joined-up thinking. It’s not the software which has been improved upon - very well in most cases. It’s not the battery, SIM and memory stick access - a brilliant improvement. It’s not the display - brighter, more clear and sharper than ever. The main issue I have is with the keypad.

It maybe a ‘getting used to it’ thing, but my major bug bear is that although the keypad buttons are beautifully spaced, they are just about the same height as the amount of flesh required to squash-in when you try to press them. Hence, much like a overweight cat sitting on a remote control, the buttons are completely covered, but don’t actually press in.

My solution to this would be my nail (thankfully since I stopped biting them in India, I now have some), but the convex shape of the buttons means all but the most concave of fingernails can press them. This means that my rather ‘pointy’ and ‘nail-like’ nails slide around as though they’re competing in the Winter Olympics.

I do seem to be getting the grip of it, but it has taken a day or so. It will get easier with time, but after just picking up and playing with my old K800i again for five minutes, I think I will miss the big, hit-them-with-a-baseball-bat style buttons.

The other major button errors are the navigation keys. For the K850i, the joystick has become a thing of the past which is unfortunate if you like amusing yourself with Java games, because it’s not so easy anymore. However I’m not overly enamored by games, so I’m just trying to get used to the Big Blue Thing that replaces the joystick and loops around the 2 and 5 keys. It isn’t really bad, but still, bring the stick back - we’re in the middle of a 1980’s revival, we should be embracing these types of old-skool technologies.

The four (or two) silver navigation keys (depending on how you look at it) really are too small considering this a phone and accepting calls/hanging up are pretty important in my old fashioned view of things. However the biggest departure in navigation is the touch-sensitive (light-sensitive) menu buttons at the base of the screen.

Initially I didn’t enjoy them, but I’m pretty fond of them and their animations now. With no tactile response, it seems odd that you’d implement just three buttons using this technology. Then again, they didn’t use much logic in designing the rest of the keypad, so why start using those brains now.

Otherwise, they’ve taken a big step in the right direction. The camera is a real camera. It has ISO selection, metering, a proper mode switch, shutter release and on/off button on the side. The lens is now sensibly protected by a clear cover rather than the fantastically effective crumb and dust pit that previous models came with. It also lights up like Kit from Knightrider, which means if the spinning light ever dies on your Sky+ box you can just sellotape your K850i to the front of it with the shutter open and party on down.

Ok, so it’s missing optical zoom, and WiFi. It’s not really a cutting edge departure in design, and it’s sort of ‘gone a bit Britney Spears’ on the keypad layout. But hey, it’s new, it’s shiny, it’s a SonyEricsson and I’ve got so many more minutes now that I’m going to have to start making new friends just to mop up the call allowance.