Launched in July 2006 (for the K800i in the UK market; others may vary), the phones are the successor to the Sony Ericsson K750i, and are the first to be tagged with the Cyber-shot branding.

The new "BestPic" feature takes 9 full quality snapshots of a subject in quick succession, allowing the user to choose the best shots from them.

The two buttons labelled by white horizontal lines, known as hotkeys or soft keys perform the function of making decisions with only two choices.

On the right-hand side of the phone there are three keys: two for controlling volume, skipping through tracks in the Media Player, changing radio channel, and zooming in and out when in camera mode.

This means that there will be no need for driver installation on modern operating systems such as Mac OS X, Windows XP and Linux, as the phone will be automatically recognized as an external storage device upon connection.

Data retrieval also includes the ability to output files by infra-red and Bluetooth (as well as in network-transmitted messages) to other devices.

Although typical of many recent Sony Ericsson devices, support for outputting files other than over the mobile network has been variable with other brands.

On some occasions, this problem can be fixed by using the Update Service software that comes on the CD (or from Sony Ericsson's website).

Sometimes dependent on age of phone/operating system the K800i doesn't show in PC media player software even when it is visible as mass storage.