Sony Ericsson didn’t decide promoting C905 just as a cameraphone purely of their modesty. This is just because C905 can’t stand up to the competitive products in the all-in-one market segment, but easily outruns them, - or in some case goes almost on a par with a marginal advantage, - when it comes to taking pictures. Assuming this role of a high-profile pureblood cameraphone the model stands out in a better light than if it were trying to disguise itself for an all-in-one solution.

The biggest problem of C905 is its being oriented at an audience covering only a part of the mass market while it could have been much bigger. Due to the availability of more versatile and balanced solutions by competitive brands, C905 has to resort to a niche, just because of SE’s devotion to their evasive approach to product design and positioning. Nokia can easily afford doing tricks like that, e.g. by releasing handsets like Nokia N96 which would never score any success on the mass market; but the company isn’t risking anything as long as their portfolio comprises a variety of more balanced solutions which offer a functionality generally no worse than that of N96, just lacking a few features exclusive to the latter device. Sony Ericsson can offer nothing else in this class on the mass market front, C905 being their only solution of this kind, so there seems to be no way for SE to artificially manage the target audience coverage. The target market of C905 is rather large, but it could have been much larger.

C905 is almost as good at taking pictures as Samsung i8510. Both gadgets set a gold standard for all the future hi-end cameraphone models, so it’s very important to keep aware of their camera’s outstanding possibilities. Here comes an article devoted solely to reviewing the two phones’ camera strengths: Camera Deathmatch: Sony Ericsson C905 vs. Samsung i8510 and M8800.

Sony Ericsson С905 Specifications:

Supported Networks: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 + UMTS/HSDPA 850/900/2100
Storage: 160 Mb of user memory, Memory Stick Micro slot (M2), 2 Gb card bundled
Screen: 2,4", QVGA (240х320), 262K
Connectivity: USB 2.0, Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR, A2DP support, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g (DLNA), TV-Out
Camera: 8.1 Mp (up to 3264х2448), auto-focusing, xenon flash, video (QVGA 30 fps)
Battery: BST-38, capacity - 930 mAh (up to 9 hours of talk time, up to 380 hours of standby)
Measurements: 104 x 49 x 18(19,5) mm
Weight: 148 g
Recommended price: €500

Design and Ergonomics

Sony Ericsson won a steadfast reputation of tasteful designers. C905 looks really amazing. There’s nothing grotesque or extravagant bout the shapes and proportions, the sad experience of K850i proved experimental design an unnecessary liberty. The slider’s dimensions and weight are on a normal scale for the latest generation of top-end devices. The handset is big enough, but not too bulky to raise any objections. The Samsung i8510 INNOV8 is of a comparable size in a closed state, but feels much bigger when opened due to a larger keyboard. The material and assembly quality was good enough to win our appreciation. By the most part, the casing is composed from a soft-touch-coated plastic either of a white or a dark color, in a way looking like K800i. Metal finds a very limited usage in this model, unlike i8510 that takes a greater liberty with this expensive material. Things are even worse for the expensive Nokia N96 though, despite the bon ton rule prevalent in the industry, prescribing a steel tuxedo for any decent top-of-the line offering. The only two metals part in the whole C905 are the back of the upper half of the slider, crafted from anodized aluminum, and the lens guard made from the same metal. The assembly quality is good enough not to betray any looseness between the sliding halves, the mechanism is tight and opens with a dry click. The play between the parts is minimized to the limit. The battery bay cover is tightly fixed and doesn’t screech on squeezing.

You won’t find a variety of materials and textures native to the fashion-aware members of the Walkman product family (W902, W980), the design is apparently shifted from fashion to utilitarian side. The handset will be available in three color versions, but the black one is going to stay the only one available for a few weeks after release. The remaining two are white and bronze. Either of the three looks good. The smart design makes the phone look more like a compact digital camera, the impression reinforced by the elaborate decoration of the back and side surface. Rounded edges crowded with control buttons and a large shoot button with a brim backlit in a bright blue – all of these elements create a solid image that fell much to our liking. This model probably has the strongest aesthetical aspect among all the offers from this class and price bracket. A neatly looking digital cam with Wi-Fi, GPS and GSM, that’s what it is.

The lens guard needs a good push to start moving. This tightness is very helpful in preventing stray openings while carried in a pocket. The availability of an active lens guard is a good point for any cameraphone: a large sliding element is anyway better for ergonomics than any dedicated buttons.

The right edge of the handset houses the shoot button, the volume controls, two shooting mode switch buttons and the media gallery button. On the left edge you’ll discover a Fast-Port firmware slot and an M2 memory expansion slot (hot swapping is possible, slot protected with a flap). The top and bottom ends of the handset are free from any controls or slots. The speaker is seated at the bottom of the handset, being a non-stereo single unit. The sound quality is average.

The keyboard looks quite trivial. The buttons aren’t separated well enough, but this is compensated by their large size. The keyboard backlight is white and strong enough to make the button markings visible in a low-light environment. When in the shooting mode, the block of functional buttons switches the backlight to a blue, the markings on the navigation button become visible. Other Cyber-shot handsets had the secondary function markings placed on a row of numerical buttons (like with K770i, K850i). C905 has them right on the navigation button instead. The control buttons are large enough to prevent any stray keystrokes.

Screen

Sony Ericsson C905 is equipped with a TFT/QVGA screen (320x240 pixels) The screen diagonal is 2,4 inches long, which isn’t much judged by the modern standards – the majority of today’s phones get 2,8 inch displays, like Nokia N96. The difference isn’t critical though, and the quality of the screen matrix is simply amazing. The only unpleasant thing is that the maximum brightness level is tied to a rather low bar. The simplest explanation would be that the developers took a great focus on maximizing the power-saving effects, even at costs like this. In the pictures below it’s easy to notice the difference:

As you see from the samples, the maximum brightness of INNOV8 is higher, but the colors and overall picture quality is better with the C905, let alone a better resistance to the direct sunlight. The screen of C905 is protected with a layer of hardened glass which is more resistant to direct physical damage than regular plastic. Right above the screen you will see the luminance sensor (occasionally mistaken for a frontal cam, which is not on the feature list) accompanied by two buttons used in games and gallery.

Battery

The model is powered by a BST-38, 930 mAh battery. The manufacturer claims a battery life spanning up to 9 hours of talk time or 400 hours of standby. A normal duty cycle (about an hour of talking, two hours of listening to the music and camera work and an hour of menu navigation and playing around with miscellaneous functions) drained a full battery charge over about three days, which is just fine for a device from that class. Generally, other SE phones score similar results. Probably Sony Ericsson have run short of power-saving tricks or view further developments on this path overly expensive, difficult or simply unnecessary for the time being.

Connectivity

Sony Ericsson C905 supports four GSM (850/900/1800/1900) and three WCDMA network types. The phone has got no frontal cam; the major manufacturers are gradually cancelling implementation of the video call technology in newer products because it never entered popular usage when the previous generation of 3G-compliant was in its heyday. HSDPA is supported, but the infrared port is missing. The onboard Bluetooth unit bases around the BT 2.0 + EDR standard. It worked fine, alone and with plugged headset alike. The following profiles are supported:

• Basic Imaging
• Dial-up Networking
• File Transfer
• Generic Access
• Generic Object Exchange
• Handsfree
• Headset
• HID
• JSR-82 Java API
• Object Push
• Personal Area Networking
• Serial Port
• Synchronization
• SyncML OBEX binding
• Audio/Video Remote Control
• Phonebook Access

The Flight Mode requires an inserted SIM card. The phone will launch if powered on while the SIM card is missing, but certain features like the player and camera applications, - which apparently have nothing to do with wireless communication, - will stay inaccessible. This problem is a weakness common to all phones by Sony Ericsson.

A firmware connector is used for cable communication. The claimed USB 2.0 compatibility doesn’t stand up to the real life data transfer speed, revolving around 800 Kbytes per second. USB Modem, Mass Storage and PictBridge connection types are supported. The wanted mode is selectable from a corresponding menu. We tested Mass Storage connection and it worked fine, both disks (the onboard memory and the flash card) were accessible from the PC. Synchronization options are available with the bundled Sony Ericsson PC Suite. The only disappointing thing on this side is the awkward location of the slot on the left edge.

The availability of Wi-Fi is a key improvement, pushing the technology edge of Sony Ericsson’s conventional phones up to a new quality level. Previously only smartphones were entitled to this privilege. A similarly designed handset G705, being a close analog the gadget in question minus the camera (replaced with a 3.2 non-autofocusing unit), is arriving to retail shortly, possessing mostly the same powers and features, so the family of GPS- and Wi-Fi-powered conventional phones is rapidly expanding. So far the only other brand to offer a full-fledged Wi-Fi in a conventional phone is Motorola with their ZN5 model. Certain Nokias have a limited Wi-Fi support as well, only helpful in transmitting voice signal in the UMA mode. C905 boasts a fine Wi-Fi sensibility. The standard list of settings includes search by device name, automated login to a predefined network, sleep mode timeout (a similar feature is available with Motorola ZN5). A Wi-Fi internet connection can be utilized for normal web browsing and direct blogging alike. The gadget is DLNA-certified. The world’s first device to feature a DLNA certificate is the Nokia N95 8GB smartphone, so C905 and similar solutions aren’t pioneers at this frontier.

Nothing was subject to change in the browser, remaining the good old NetFront 3.4. The feature list contains entries like a picture saving option, the SmartFit feature, switching to horizontal mode, page zooming, etc. But OperaMini is always preferable due to its superior functionality, NetFront 3.4 being a very basic application.

Java Performance

Our performance tests revealed the Java machine installed on C905 to differ in execution speed from the normal results expected from a generic Sony Ericsson phone taken from this price bracket. It must have been the 8.4 Java runtime update that influenced the results. Resource-hungry applications involving the use of 3D graphics are now running more smoothly, winning a better score in the tests, but the rest of applications, on the contrary, have been hindered in performance. The platform is pretty raw, so we are sure this weird thing is going to be fixed in an another update shortly. Nevertheless, the differences in performance are so marginal that you won’t notice it in everyday life, unless you have an atomic clock brain implant tuned for the finest accuracy in performance tests. We hope you don’t, so be prepared to experience no perceptible lag or boost while ordering the typical actions with a C905.

The Capuchin project incorporated into this version of Java platform is responsible for an enhanced compatibility with the Flash technology, but we aren’t able to draw any conclusions on this point until a large enough number of Flash-based applications appear; so far this feature is but a misc selling point, but has a huge hidden potential (should the software developers get interested with it). Having a very limited number of smartphones in their portfolio, Sony Ericsson are largely focused on improving their proprietary platform, but it will never reach the level of S60, constantly polished by Nokia. There’s no way for comparisons with Series 40 either, for Nokia deliberately limits the use of some of the features, reserving certain ones for exclusive use in S60 products only. Series 40 is predominantly used for making products the target audience of which isn’t likely to get interested by the excessive functionality of S60-based devices.

User Interface

Sony Ericsson C905 is built around the A200 platform. If you want to learn more about the basic feature package coming with it, we advise getting over to a detailed overview spotlighting this topic, available from our site:

Sony Ericsson A200 Platform Base Functionality

A few alternate interface themes are available, each doing unique changes in the graphical appearance and the arrangement of the elements. As in the previous products, there are three view modes available for the main menu: the traditional 4x3 matrix, a circular menu and a looped assembly belt where one large icon is following the other as you press the Next button until you’ve gone all the way through, after which the last icon in the row will be succeeded by the first one. The menu makes an extensive use of animated effects and pop-up windows. So far Sony Ericsson phones are credited with probably the best looking menu interface on the market. A comparable level of graphics can be found in Nokia products based off the sixth revision of the Series 40 platform, but in that case the excellence comes at the price of low performance and lags.

Preinstalled Software

The three preinstalled games are Need For Speed ProStreet, Tennis Multiplay and Kasparov Chess.

The default software package is quite standard, including applications like AccuWeather (weather forecast viewer), StandbyWorld (a variety of clocks with customizable time zones to be shown on the screen during standby; you can have several clocks replacing one another in a loop, all running with different time zone settings) The last entry on this list is the small CamPlus application, which serves as an alternative to the default camera application, offering an extra two shooting modes. The PhotoMate application is what you’d want to use for easy and smart photo viewing, offering a variety of nice-looking transition effects. But still, all this stuff combined doesn’t stand up to the rich functionality of homologous applications installed on Samsung i8510 INNOV8.

The GPS functionality was subject to no changes from the days of W760i or C702 – you get the same Wayfinder Navigator and a copy of Google Maps mobile 2.0 which is equally well-tasked for interaction with plain Cell ID data and the coordinates gathered by the independent onboard GPS receiver. The A-GPS and geo-tagging functions are well supported. The Tracker application isn’t included, deliberately reserved to models like W760i or C702. A three months’ software license is supplied with each copy of C905. The Wayfinder Navigator software makes use of TeleAtlas maps. Samsung i8510 uses the Route 66 navigation software, also using maps by TeleAtlas coming with a 3-month license.

Google Maps 2.0 is listed as a default feature of the A200 platform; combined with a full-fledged onboard GPS receiver, it would offer every possibility for a very precise global positioning. There’s no such unit in Z770i, yet a basic navigation functionality is preserved. Google Maps is free; the program comes fully configured and has a number of extra settings in addition to the standard functionality of the base version. You can choose the preferred system of measures, to precise map scaling, add chosen locations to your favorites list, customize the route calculation routine and search by locations and bookmarks. The application interface is rather handy; the downsides are a lack of possibility to recalculate the route or save it. Nokia Maps 2.0 available to most existing smartphones offers a much better functionality and comfort of operation, remaining the market’s leading solution.

Multimedia features

Let's start with the most interesting aspect, the Media menu. It appears like some conventional viewer, but with an interface strongly reminiscent of Sony PSP; it also makes use of the accelerometer. A corresponding option provides for an automated screen aspect change, which sometimes proves more annoying than handy. The sole supported screen rotation direction is to the left. If the handset rests on its right edge or is turned upside down, the screen aspect will not change. Moreover, if you are lying on your left side, the screen will stupidly rotate to the horizontal position, leaving you no other way than going to the menu and turning the option off.

The player interface has a brand Sony Ericsson style. The settings include repeated and random playback, sorting by artist and genre, an enhanced stereo option and progressive rewinding. The Album Arts feature allows to view the currently playing album's cover. While Nokia phones support alternate player skins, this degree of customization is still out of Sony Ericsson's reach, which is a serious downside.

The playlist organization is a rather smart feature; tracks can be added to a playlist either one by one or a group (or all) of them with a single action (a checkbox is shown by the title of each track). The set of equalizers varies depending on the individual model. The non-music Z770i totally lacks any kind of an equalizer while W890i has a whole six of them: from the typical Rock and Pop to the brand Mega Bass mode. Unlike UIQ-based smartphones (e.g. G700/G900, W960i), A200 devices lack the Auto Playlists functionality which would normally include a rating system listing the latest added, the last played and the most and least frequently played tracks, also allowing for sorting by time (Time Machine)

The availability of the Clear Audio Experience feature pack constitutes a fundamental difference between the latest generation of Walkman handsets and the previous ones. This audio signal processing technique can influence the sounding in a big way. Sony Ericsson W980i and W902 exhibit an apparent advantage in comparison with the earlier models. The sound settings are very flexible, working just fine in combination with the equalizers. To some users this might create an illusion of a higher quality, but in real life there’s absolutely no difference in hardware used by these models and C905. Non-music phones by Sony Ericsson also lack such useful extras as Shake Control and Sense Me. The color schemes used by the player interface are also different, but hardly anything else.

The TrackID service enjoys a correct implementation. With it, you are able to capture a fragment of a song playing on the radio or in the player and upload it to a web server where it will be identified. If found in the database, the song’s title and the name of the artist are returned back to the user as a short report. Further you may want to choose buying this song right from the web. The service is really interesting and useful, especially seen in co-operation with the onboard FM tuner.

Camera

A detailed overview of the camera capabilities compared against other available 8 Mp camera phones is found here:

Sony Ericsson C905 camera and comparison with Samsung i8510 and M8800 PIXON

Smape's opinion

The most amazing thing about C905 is its design; an ‘epic win’, as a web-surfing youngster would say, is the best term to describe what SE’s product designers ended up with. Okay, that’s not the sole point of pride. The handset is considerably smaller than its indirect competitor i8510. The cam installed on C905 does great at taking portrait shots in the dark (e.g. at a club party), backed up by the full power of a xenon flash (you won’t find one with the competing offers). But is that enough for justifying the high price? You won’t find any metal among on the list of materials, and it doesn’t look the way it would have looked if it had been up to taking a niche in the segment of exclusive fashion phones; in plain words, it doesn’t look like a piece of luxury, opposite to what the price tries to suggest, even despite its cool looks. The model doesn’t suffer from any flaws as far as the assembly quality and ergonomics are concerned, but neither has it had any advantages over the competitive brands on these fronts. The product in a way fades into the background, giving reason neither for hatred nor for admiration, it’s simply can’t pass for ‘the salt of the land’, something you would want to have caught by the spotlight for a few more minutes. The price isn’t justified by the bundling, audio capabilities, availability of any exclusive applications or services either – everything very plain on this front. So it will only find a buyer among the people who are looking after a hi-end cameraphone but express little concern over the rest of the features (or at least don’t care to have the rest of the functionality pulled up to the extreme level)

Sony Ericsson will enter the market during the final days of October with a price tag of 600 euros. Compared to the 8 Gb version of Samsung i8510 priced roughly at 650 euros, a difference far for being critical in the top price bracket, it becomes clear that that C905 will make a firm stand against the competitive offerings. Sony Ericsson have always been successful in imbuing their products with some real taste and elegance, using these strengths to compensate for not the highest functionality around in products like W980 or W902; of course it stands to reason that they have backed up their designer’s talents with the use of quality materials and a sound assembly. The company isn't trying to penetrate into the all-in-one segment, apparently, though some of their latest products are laying some claim to a level of technology not below than one commonly associated with all-in-one devices. C905 is a highly specialized solution enjoying a perfect accordance between its positioning and the actual stuffing. The product will win a notable success inside its specific market niche (which isn’t too narrow anyway, covering a large target audience), but we really hope that some price reduction will take place to give the gadget a maximum advantage. There’s little chance that the target audiences of i8510 INNOV8 and C905 will interesect, and even less reason in any attempt of making direct comparisons (as if the two belonged to the same niche). Even given an extra bit of functionality scarcely expected outside the guild of PDAs and smartphones, C905 makes a top-ranking cameraphone but doesn’t stand up to the title of an all-in-one device with chances to challenge Samsung and Nokia smart gadgets on their native fields.

Related Links

Camera Deathmatch: Sony Ericsson C905 vs. Samsung i8510 and M8800

Samsung i8510 INNOV8: The Final Showdown

Nokia N85 Review

Samsung M8800 PIXON Review

Author: Anton Spiridonov, playdead1@gmail.com

SMAPE.com

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