Sony Ericsson Cybershot C905 Review

The Sony Ericsson C905 is the first of its kind that broke the barrier of 8MP camera for a mobile phone. It is a beautiful 3G camera phone with decent feature set like GPS, full featured media player, FM Radio with RDS and some advanced smartphone features like 3G and WiFi connectivity. But is Sony Ericsson in this particular genre worth a buy? Let’s find out.

Design

The build of the phone seems to be thick at 18mm and sturdy with a massive 136g weight. The width of 49mm and 104 mm height feels very comfortable in hand. The rubberised body looks very attractive and is firm enough to protect the high resolution camera inside. The sliding out of the keypad is smooth. The keypad is flat and easy to use at high speed but the buttons under the screen looks very ugly. There are two further buttons above the screen which are used to select camera modes and scene modes when the camera is open. The camera lens is hidden behind a stainless panel on the back of the phone. There is a port at the bottom which connects the USB cable, the charger and the headphone. Yes, we miss the standard 3.5 mm headphone which would be nice with a good featured phone like this.

Camera

The main feature of C905 is its camera as with all ‘C’ series phones from Sony Ericsson. The resolution is amazing 8.1 MP with many user friendly camera features to capture the perfect picture. The camera seems borrow every interesting feature from their lineup of leading digital cameras. The camera is activated by sliding the stainless steel cover even in locked mode. With the lens open, it is a full featured camera with zoom, capture and selector switches and some in camera features like Face detection, red eye reduction, built-in image stabilizer, Best Pic (which takes nine shots one after another with the press of a button and saves only the best one) etc. The Xenon Flash is as good as a decent digcam to light the dark background.

Display

The display is nice 2.4 inch QVGA TFT with scratch resistant mineral glass cover to protect the screen. The 256K color display looks very nice at 240 X 320 pixels resolution. There is accelerometer which does the usual task of switching the screen to landscape or portrait mode as you reorient the phone.

Music

The music player is fully featured and supports all popular audio formats. The album art display allows the user to view album covers on their screen and track ID music recognition feature will provide the user with the name of the song, the artist and the album after you record a few seconds of that song. You can listen to music using high quality integrated speakers or use the stereo headset. The internal memory of 160 MB isn’t huge enough but an 8GB Micro Memory Stick would be surely sufficient. There is also FM Radio with RDS support which will keep you entertained even when you have no music stored in your phone.

Connectivity

The phone supports Quad band GSM which means it can be used throughout the world. The 3G HSDPA connectivity gives upto 3.6 Mbps speed and it also supports WiFi connectivity. The C905 also features DLNA network support for media sharing with a compatible networked device, like a Sony PlayStation 3. Once connected the C905 is cable of pushing media (audio, photos and video) to the PS3 and having it displayed on the connected TV. The mobile email experience has been improved with Exchange ActiveSync, which synchronises with your Microsoft Exchange mail server. It also supports Stereo Bluetooth or A2DP for best quality audio entertainment.

GPS

The Assisted GPS navigation system supports Google Maps and allows the user to get direction and best possible routes when making a journey. The pictures can also be geo-tagged which means you don’t have to remember where the pictures were taken.

Conclusion

The C905 delivers what it is expected to do but there is nothing that can make it a winner over the other phones. The camera of the device will not replace the dedicated digital cameras for their picture quality. There is 3G and WiFi but it is not a smartphone to use those capabilities to full extent. The design and the pricing is also not attractive by any means. You can buy the phone if you are a Sony Ericsson fan, otherwise I would say that there are better phones available in the market than the C905.