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By Damian Koh
Jul 14, 2008

At the Barcelona-based Mobile World Congress this year, two imaging-focused handsets were added to the Cyber-shot family, the C702 and the C902. With that, Sony Ericsson's camera-phones have taken on a new naming convention beginning with the letter C to represent Cyber-shot instead of K which has its roots in the Swedish language. Camera is spelt kamera in Sweden. Although Sony Ericsson followed up soon after with the C905 Cyber-shot at CommunicAsia in June, the C902 was available only recently. Let's take a look at what this 5-megapixel camera-phone offers.

Design

At just 10.5mm thin, the C902 marks a huge departure from the chunky 17mm-thick K850i, making it the slimmest Cyber-shot from the Japanese-Swedish maker yet. The biggest change compared with the earlier Cyber-shots is the sliding camera cover. It resembles a removable top lid that isn't detachable. Because of its unique design, the camera is well hidden from sight when not in use and there aren't any awkward protrusions, circa K810i. To Sony Ericsson's credit, the K850i had already resolved that problem, but it's the C902 that takes the lean form factor up another notch.

The "Where's the camera?" question never fails to crack us up everytime we show the phone to unsuspecting friends. To be honest, anyone seeing the C902 for the first time will need to spend some time fiddling with it before they figure out how to activate the shooter. The revelation comes only after we slide the lid across to the side to reveal the 5-megapixel camera. The biggest downside to this is the volume control, typically found along the edge toward the top (when the phone is upright), which is now at the bottom. This makes it really awkward to adjust the volume when the phone is to our ear as we have to rely on our pinkie instead.

The numeric keypad is another issue to contend with. Although the buttons are of a reasonable size, the downward-angled surface and the overtly stiff feedback like the ones on the Nokia Siroccos aren't the most ideal for typing. We could feel only a small strip at the apex of each button with our thumbs when texting and it made typing on the keypad a less-than-ideal experience. Usually we wouldn't mention this in our reviews, but trying to remove the battery cover was a horrible experience. We had to wedge our nails into a tiny slit and pry the slab open with force. While it wouldn't really matter much for guys, it will be disastrous for ladies with nicely manicured nails. To be fair, no one opens the battery cover everyday and you'll need to do this onlyif you want to swap the M2 flash media or SIM card.

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