In June, Sony Ericsson raised the bar for cameraphones announcing the first 8-megapixel phone intended for the European market - C905. A few months later, it just comes to the market, left behind the competition; Samsung already launched the INNOV8 and Pixon and LG offers its Renoir. The Cyber-shot model wasn’t first to hit the market, but it still might be the best so far. Although it is touted to be a “real camera rival”, the C905 has yet to prove that. The key characteristics in this aspect are a camera-like design, Xenon flash, face recognition, and picture tagging, thanks to the built-in GPS. C905 is the first non-smartphone of the manufacturer with an integrated Wi-Fi support, which can be used for Internet access and DLNA-compatible devices (e.g. to view pictures on DLNA-capable TV wirelessly).

Design

As Sony Ericsson claims, C905’s design really reminds us of the pocket digital cameras. That’s traditional for the manufacturer, but this model is the best so far in this aspect. It resembles a camera from all sides. It has the same dimensions and weight as a pocket camera, which definitely makes it ineligible to be called a small phone. However, this is no surprise for such a pretentious functionality-wise model.

The 2.4” display is larger than the other screens in the series (2“ in C902, and 2.2” in К850) but is way behind compared to the competition – 2.8” for INNOV8, 3” for Renoir and 3.2” for Pixon. There are no surprises in its specifications; QVGA with 262k color support, typical for Sony Ericsson. The images on it look good not only indoors but in bright sunlight too.

SSo far, all representatives of the Cyber-shot series were candybar, but C905 changes that. It is a slider intended to be used closed as a camera and opened as a phone (it can still act as a camera when opened). On the front, there are two shortcuts for Scenes and Shooting Modes (upper part) and two columns of three buttons on each side of the 5-way D-pad (bottom). We have nothing to say about the two small shortcuts, maybe because they are relatively rarely used, but we are definitely not happy with the rest. There are tiny channels between each button of the two “trios”, and pressing them is hardly felt due to the short drive they have. You’ll always activate them but the lack of a tactile.

It is very easy to slide the phone open and it reveals the numeric keypad. There are channels between the rows of buttons but every row seems to be one body. Here, the drive of the keys is also short, but in contrast to the navigational ones, they have good tactile feedback, so we like them better. In slider phones, the upper row is usually hard to operate, because it’s too close to the edge, but C905 doesn’t have this problem. Nevertheless, there’s an irritating edge in the bottom. We will not recommend the keyboard to heavy texters, but that’s not a deal breaker.

In order to resemble a camera, C905 has to have similar controls. Those are located on the right side (top when in landscape mode) and they are: a volume/zoom rocker, keys for previewing and changing the shooting modeand the shutter illuminated in blue. The idea for changing the modes is better than the one seen in K850 and INNOV8, employing a 3-way switch. This will allow the user to review the images and go back to shooting by a single press of a button. Previously, with the 3-way switch you had to always check its position before selecting a mode. The left side houses only the M2 card slot and the one for the charger/headphones.

We like the design of the lid protecting the lens. In contrast to K850, it is not automatic and you have to slide it manually like in K800/K810. However, here it is not protruding but leveled. That’s a new type of mechanism where the bottom part sinks when opening the lid and rises back up when closing. We think this is the best idea for a manual camera lid in a phone. Underneath we have “hidden” the Xenon flash and the LED light used for focus assisting and when shooting a video, mini mirror and the lens, of course. It is interesting that such a flash is used even though the manufacturer was, claiming that overall, the PhotoFlash, also developed by Sony Ericsson’s engineers (based on LED and employed in C902), is better.

Display

Sony Ericsson C905 employs a 2.4" 256K-color TFT display of QVGA resolution. Mineral glass coating ensures scratch resistance. The crystal-clear screen excels in both contrast and brightness. Dark colors are really dark. Sunlight legibility is better than your average Sony Ericsson mobile but still is far from perfect.

Another thing we love about this display is that it reflects almost nothing, even when it's blank in power-saving mode.

User interface

Wi-Fi and built-in GPS aside, which are out of the feature phone world, at the core of Sony Ericsson C905 is the usual SE user interface with the latest styling tweaks. By the way, latest is by no means brand new and the C905 has nothing to outdo the former Cyber-shot top dog C902 or high-end Walkmans. By the way, Sony Ericsson have set up a nice little interactive tool here for you to explore the phone interface and features.

The first thing to mention is the main menu structure. Except the traditional 4 x 3 grid matrix, the main menu is perked up with a couple of alternative views: rotating and single icon view.

The rotating view shows three animated front icons on the display, the center one showing the active selection. The other two icons are half-hidden, just as an indication of what comes next. Five other menu icons can be seen in the dim background.

The icon view displays a single icon at a time and a vertical bar, which this time isn't a simple position mapping graphic but features tiny icons for the other main menu entries. Neither of those view modes works with shortcut keys. Only the Grid view allows quick numeric keypad access - a good enough reason to forget about the other options once you've tried them.

As most previous models, the C905 has a dedicated Flight mode. When turning on the phone, you may opt to start it directly into Flight mode but the Sony Ericsson C905 cannot work in Flight mode unless a SIM card is inserted. The other irritating thing is that toggling the flight mode requires a reboot of the phone.

Sony Ericsson C905 supports Flash Lite themes, which change the color scheme and wallpaper. Our test handset had two themes preinstalled only, but we guess that there will be more on the retail C905 units.

The C905 features the well-known Activity menu. The Running Apps tab of this menu offers basic multi-tasking - for example you can run two Java applications and in the same time listen to the radio or music player. The Activity menu also offers quick access to recent events, the web and My Shortcuts menu, which contains a user-defined list of shortcuts to favorite features.

Phonebook

The phonebook hasn’t changed and has remained the same for almost 3 years now (5 generations). There are quite some fields when adding a new contact (various numbers, addresses, birthdays, additional information) and they are well grouped. However, it’s strange (and inconvenient) not to be able to search by second name in a model from 2008. We like the fact that upon entering digits from the home screen, name and number matches appear. However, here as well, those include first name entries only.

Organizer

The organizer functions have not been modified either. As a whole, everything is well made, but we do have some remarks. In the calendar for example, there are enough fields when adding an event, but the days with one are only slightly marked (bold) and are hardly noticeable. The alarms offer many options and the only thing we didn’t like was that they are limited to five. The tasks, notes, timers and the calculator are just fine. We don’t see any point in having the coded notes and prefer to have password protected ones instead.

Similarly to K850, here we also have an RSS reader, but it is located in the multimedia menu. This application is used for viewing the content of web sites without having to actually load them. The option to see the latest info from your favorite sites directly on the homescreen (like widgets) is very nice.

Flashy Media Center

Sony Ericsson are obviously trying to place more and more content and options in the media center. We appreciate their effort as we simply love the media interface. Sony Ericsson C905 is equipped with Music Player 3.0, which is almost the same as the Walkman player 3.0 seen in Sony Ericsson W980. The player supports numerous file formats, including MP3, AAC, AAC+, E-AAC +, WAV, WMA, M4A and MIDI plus the MegaBass equalizer preset and Stereo widening.

The player can naturally be set to run in the background. Sound is rich and crisp - as long you're using the player with a good headset, that is. If you are not willing to use the media player step-by-step structure, you can directly play a track through the file manager with its classic flat tree structure.

The video player accommodated in the media center supports fast-forwarding and rewinding, while the interface is simple and stylish. The built-in motion sensor allows the video player to auto rotate. Again, the video files are accessible via the file manager but there you cannot opt to auto rotate the file, which we found a bit odd. Landscape mode can be set from the menu though. Fullscreen player mode and screenshot capability, are some cool extras in the player. You can save a frame of video and add it to the gallery.

The Media center menu lists the Photo, Music, Video, RSS feeds and Settings icons. Along with the traditional functionality we've discussed in detail in several Sony Ericsson reviews, there is one extra icon for Games. The settings menu is simple - you may opt for portrait, landscape or auto rotate screen orientation, thanks to the integrated motion sensor.

The first section in the Media Center is the Photo gallery. It consists of: Latest Photo, Camera Album, Photo Tags, Photo Feeds, and Pictures. Latest Photo provides quick access to most recent photos. Camera Album is a thumb list for each month of the year. When a month is open, it reveals a 4x3 grid of thumbs of photos. Scrolling down shows all the photos taken in the corresponding month. The highlighted photo is a bit larger for better viewing.

Generally, the Photo gallery is a powerful tool for conveniently managing a vast collection of camera photos with great customization capabilities. Photo Tags is a feature for displaying previously marked favorite photos. The Up key on the D-pad offers quick access to sending options like: send as Picture Msg, as email, to blog, via Bluetooth. Other than that, you can set a photo as wallpaper, screen saver, startup screen, and contact picture straight from the gallery. The well known Pan and Zoom and slideshow feature are also on board.

Accordingly, picture browsing via the classic file manager is still possible, but kind of pushed aside with the timeline view missing. This is quite a pity, in mind that T650 and K810 have it. The integrated FM radio of Sony Ericsson C905 has memory for 20 stations and supports RDS. It has nice interface and makes great use of the TrackID music recognition service. The radio can be minimized in the background much like the music player but offers none of the fancy fullscreen graphics.

TrackID is accessible through its original location in the entertainment menu. The service itself has seen several changes to include features like "Find similar Music", "Send music info via SMS", "TrackID charts" and a very extensive "Artist info" section.

Camera

As we’ve already mentioned, the camera is C905’s key feature. Being shy in all other aspects, we hope that at least here, the new Sony Ericsson model will bring something to the table. Startup and focusing is relatively quick (under 2 seconds), but storing takes about 5.5 seconds, which is a lot slower than the competition. The software is decent, offers a lot of options and here it’s a leader in the non-touch phone division. We have the face recognition, but there’s no sign of the more advanced smile and blink detection.

We’ll keep repeating that the most important thing for a camera is the quality of the photos. C905 did not disappoint us here. The daylight images are usually with the best quality for each model, but C905 is a step behind the competition. The detail level is similar to the one seen in the other 8-megapixel phones but we have a problem with the colors. As in K810 and K850 it looks like there’s a grey filter, which makes them less saturated and with lower contrast. However, we loved snapping pictures with the Xenon flash. It illuminated images very well at 6.5 and 13 feet and C905 is the leader in this discipline. The macro and night pictures made with the phone are similar to the ones made with the other 8-megapixel phones with minor differences. Considering the fact that this type of photographs are not made rarely, we think they are not that important.

Apparently, Sony Ericsson doesn’t realize how important the video recording is for a high-class cameraphone. It has become a tradition for the company to be behind in this aspect and unfortunately, we don’t see any changes in the new generation, able to record QVGA clips only. The pictures in the phone can be viewed in the multimedia flash menu; the realization is very good and we like the way those are arranged in albums full of thumbnails. Congratulations to Sony Ericsson for the fast zooming and the ability for picture tagging.

Conclusion

Well, there's a beast of a Cyber-shot at large, so you'd better watch out. Sony Ericsson C905 is already in the hands of the first users and for all we know they should be quite happy. The nice camera-centric styling and solid interface are the right place to start exploring and enjoying a wealth of talent. Indeed, it's a feature set that built-in GPS and Wi-Fi make really hard to resist.

The outstanding camera performance gives the C905 all the reasons to hope for a meaningful and rewarding run. Some minor built quality concerns and inadequate video recording seem easily outweighed. Now, all of that is more than reassuring if you look at the latest Cyber-shot on its own. But it may get well painful in that small but steep 8-megapixel food chain.

At this point we know the C905 as more affordable than the INNOV8 but that's more or less offset by storage, the larger display and the Symbian blood. With LG KC910 Renoir and Samsung M8800 Pixon poised to take off, it soon won't matter that INNOV8 and C905 drew first blood.