The Sony Ericsson C905 may look a little workmanlike, but this Cyber-shot branded handset (until the Sony Ericsson Idou arrives at least) has the best camera we’ve seen in a mobile phone.
The whopping 8.1-megapixel sensor is definitely the Sony Ericsson C905’s draw. And that’s complemented by a handful of features that wouldn’t look amiss on a compact camera: dedicated buttons galore, face recognition, auto-focus and smile shutter (after a firmware upgrade) which only fires off snaps when the subject is grinning. Could be a problem if your subject’s Gordon Brown.
In sunshine, then, the Sony Ericsson C905 takes excellent photos. Bright colours and fine definition abound in good light, while the Xenon flash makes a pretty good fist of illuminating any subterranean hell-hole you may find yourself in. Plus you can save them to the 160MB of internal memory or, if that’s not enough (and it won’t be), MS Micro card.
Away from the camera function, you’ll also get assisted GPS (which is good, but basically satnav with data charges for using it) but that can be a bit tough to follow on the small 2.4-inch screen, a great music player and a decent browser. Battery life, in all honesty is pretty average at nine hours talk time and 380 hours standby, and for some reason, it doesn’t feel as easy to use as previous Sony Ericssons. Everything takes a few more button presses to get to.
You tolerate those niggles, though, because when it comes to camera phones there are few better at the moment than the Sony Ericsson C905.