By Damian Koh
14/07/2008
URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/mobilephones/0,39051199,42689970p,00.htm

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.

Features

Besides its 5-megapixel camera, the C902 is one of the earliest Sony Ericsson camera-phones to employ touch-sensitive controls. Unlike the G900 which allows users to set the focus area of the picture simply by touching a point on the screen, the C902 follows a less adventurous path with only touch-sensitive keys for camera functions. There are eight of them in total--four above the 2-inch QVGA display and four below--that control various functions such as shooting mode, scenes, timer and flash. Pressing each of these touch keys will register a slight pulse of vibration to replace the tactility you would otherwise get with conventional buttons. Previously, dedicated camera keys such as the ones on the K850i and the K770i were numeric buttons that pulled double-duty.

Other camera functions include face detection which has gradually become a standard option on digicams, onboard image stabilizer and geotagging capabilities. While it's great to see fancy features, these have limited uses. For example, we rarely got the face detection feature to track multiple faces and it could lock focus on only one face at a time. The geotagging option on our review unit, too, was disappointing. We couldn't select the feature because it was grayed-out in the menu.

The biggest upset on the C902 is the lack of a Xenon flash module. Granted, it has happened before on the K770i Cyber-shot. But it's not clear why Sony Ericsson decided to go with an LED flash on the "high-performance" C902. An LED light is more useful for shooting videos as it can provide a constant source of light, but we'd have preferred a more powerful Xenon flash for an imaging-focused phone like the C902.

Cosmetics aside, Sony Ericsson has spruced up the user interface of the C902. Users will be able to select two different main menu layouts in addition to the standard 4-by-3 grid. In Rotating mode, the icons are lined in a carousel and bounce when highlighted. In Single icon mode, users can see only one magnified icon while the rest of the options are arranged in a column on the right. When any one of the menu options is selected, the animated icon "jumps" toward the user before fading off into the background.

Pressing the letters on the keypad will instantly call up the relevant phonebook entries. Google Maps is preinstalled, though you'll need to pair the phone with an external GPS unit to get a lock on the satellites (otherwise it will simply use the cell ID information to give a rough estimate of the location you are in). The media browser UI is also still one of the best around.

On the entertainment front, the Need for Speed ProStreet game is perhaps one of the more successful implementations of the phone's built-in accelerometer. To steer the race car, we tilted the handset left or right. Gimmicky, yes, but it's also heartening to know that Sony Ericsson is making full use of this feature rather than simply as an orientation sensor for the screen. Speaking of which, the LCD display doesn't occupy the entire front estate of the screen due to the space needed for the two columns of camera touch-sensitive keys.

Connectivity-wise, the quad-band GSM phone supports HSDPA and also comes with 160MB of onboard memory with an expansion slot for Memory Stick Micro M2 cards. Other features include an ambient light sensor and a front-facing QCIF camera for video calls, both found above the phone's display.

Performance

The 950mAh Lithium-polymer battery is rated for up to 9 hours of talktime and slightly over 15 days on standby. Based on our regular pattern of calling, sending text messages and listening to music via A2DP, we had to recharge the phone at the end of the second day of use. Call audio volume and sound quality were decent, though it was mostly let down by the awkwardly placed volume keys. Sony Ericsson provides an attachment for the headset which has a socket for a 3.5mm headset, so you can still use your personal earphones for listening to music.

The camera module had one of the better shutter timings for a camera-phone. In our tests, we registered only a 0.4-second lag, but it didn't beat the Motorola ZINE ZN5's timing of 0.15 second. Color reproduction was typical of Sony Ericsson Cyber-shots with nicely saturated tones in good lighting, though it was rather misleading looking at photos from the phone's screen compared with on a desktop. On the latter, it appeared to carry less "punch", and for night shots it almost always ended up underexposed even with flash.

Conclusion

Handling the C902 Cyber-shot gave us mixed impressions. While we awarded brownie points for its fashionable design and lean form factor, the stiff, angled keys and the position of the volume buttons make us hesitant about recommending the phone.