Sony Ericsson C902 review
|
|
|
By Michell Bak, 31st of July 2008.
The Sony Ericsson C902 is Sony Ericsson’s latest Cyber-shot branded
phone on the market, and with its slightly updated camera software and
additional features, it is also the best Cyber-shot phone on the
market, although it lacks a xenon flash. While C902 does pack a decent
feature set, the most impressive thing about it is undoubtedly its
build quality and feel.
Official product pictures of the Sony Ericsson C902
Advantages
- Quad-band GSM / EDGE / UMTS 2100 / HSDPA 2100
- Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR
- Extremely well built
- Nice design and good quality feel
- Phone software
- Loud speaker
- Well-performing camera
- Good call quality and network reception strength
- Bundled memory card reader
Disadvantages
- Only 2100 MHz 3G support
- Only 2 inch display
- No GPS
- No WLAN
- No xenon flash
- At times sluggish user interface
I’d have to say that the phone most similar to the C902 is the ageing T650. Both are very well built thin phones that look great and feature a nice camera. In terms of specifications, it’s rather similar to the K850, although there are a few software differences and quite a few hardware differences.
The C902 box is very much alike the K800/K810/K850 ones. Everything is separated in smaller boxes inside. Apart from the phone itself and its battery, also included is a charger, USB cable, a standard stereo headset, leather wrist strap, USB M2 card reader (CCR-70, as shown below), software CD and a the usual user guides, etc. All in all it seems like a rather nice collection of bundled accessories.
Incredibly well built
C902’s display is a relatively small 2 inch TFT display. Its
resolution is the usual 240 x 320 pixels, which is more than enough to
make the display look very crisp. The display can show up to 262.144
colours. The colours are well saturated, the display is bright and it’s
pretty legible in sunlight. Having said so, it is not as good as the
one in K850 or W760.
Around the display are eight touch-sensitive camera shortcuts that work very well - more on that later!
Next on the list is the keypad. I’m personally not much of a fan of
it. It’s too hard to press, and the tactile feedback isn’t very good.
In addition to this, the keys are placed too close to each other, which
makes it even harder to use.
The upper keys, soft keys and navigation D-pad generally work a bit
better than the alphanumeric keypad, although they’re far from great
either.
C902’s dimensions are 108 x 49 x 10.5 millimetres. It is actually a
bit long, and it’s even longer when the camera protection has been slid
open. Its thin waist line makes up for it, though. C902 tips the scales
at 107 grams, which is mainly because of its metal body. The weight in
combination with the thin body makes it feel very good in hand.
C902 is available in a few colour variants; Swift Black and Luscious
Red. I think my personal favourite would be the Luscious Red one, as
the red colours around the front and on the back makes it a bit more
interesting to look at.
The back of the C902 is rather clean. Sony Ericsson decided to put a
powerful speaker on the bottom back of the phone, and hide the camera
with a special cover mechanism. I’m not sure how durable this sliding
cover will be, but it seemed to be pretty sturdy, although I only had
the phone for about three weeks.
On the left side we’ve got the FastPort connector, and nothing else.
This is the connector you use when charging the phone, transferring
data, and connect it to a headset or any other wired accessory.
The right side is also pretty clean, although it houses the camera
shutter key and zoom/volume keys. The placement of these keys is rather
comfy when in camera mode, although it’s not that great when listening
to music.
The bottom of the C902 holds a set of microphones (yes, two of them!), and the top of the phone holds nothing.
The battery cover covers most of the back. It can be removed pretty
easily, unveiling the metal body of the C902. The cover hides the
Memory Stick Micro slot, as well as the SIM card slot and the battery.
The battery is a standard 930 mAh BST-38 (Li-Polymer). Official battery
statements are really good - 400 hours (350 hours on 3G networks) of
standby time, or 9 (3½ on 3G networks) hours of talk time. My
experiences with C902 show that the official figures are about right,
so that’s great!
User interface
The most important factor when deciding whether or not a user
interface is good is undeniably how easy it is to use and how speedy it
is. The A2 software platform used in Sony Ericsson’s mid/high-end
feature phones has been significantly updated with newer phones, such
as the C702, C902 and W760. The first and early software revisions of
this platform had been bashed for not being all that responsive, and
generally quite unstable. It seems like most issues have been dealt
with, but mainly in all other phones than C902. I noticed several bugs
with the C902; one was when I tried transferring a bunch of photos via
Bluetooth, and the menus were taking several seconds to open. I tried
it out later, though, and it was working just fine - odd. The overall
speed with the C902 is unfortunately also a tad slower than in other
phones based on the same software platform. It is by no means as bad as
it was with the first K850 software revisions, but nonetheless it’s an
annoyance factor, and hopefully it can be fixed.
The interface is visually impressive, and can portrait whatever you
may desire, although the limited screen size on C902 makes it a little
less joyful. The C902 comes preloaded with five themes. You’d think
there’d be a bit for everyone, but they’re generally quite dark with
the exception of one rather boring theme. Luckily, thousands of high
quality themes can be downloaded for free on lots of theme websites,
i.e. eSeth.net. You can even create your own theme, if you’re into that.
The menu layout can be altered according to your likings. You’ve got
a total of four layouts to choose from - these are; Grid, Rotating,
Single icon, and Theme. The first one is the default layout, and is
probably also the one most users are accustomed to. The second is a bit
more interesting, although it’s also a bit slower in use, because
you’ll have to go through a circle of menu icons. The single icon
layout is basically a list of the menu icons. This one is also
significantly slower in practical use. The last one enables any
theme-defined Flash Lite menus, and activates this menu layout.
One of the features I like most about Sony Ericsson’s feature phones
is the activity menu. It is unfortunately also one of the features most
people tend to forgot about, although it is capable of a lot. The
activity menu is basically a pop-menu that allows you to see recent
events, such as phone calls, messages, and calendar events, browse and
manage running applications, have access to a bunch of user-defined
shortcuts as well as your collection of bookmarks.
I’ve commented on the new soft key layout in previous reviews, so I
won’t go into much detail about it. It works just fine, and previous
owners of older phones won’t have much of a hassle settling with the
new layout. After some time, I quickly found it better and faster in
general use.
Applications
C902 comes with two Java applications pre-installed. These are Face
Warp and Photo Mate. Face Warp is a rather fun application that some
might have tried earlier on, as it’s been pre-installed on a few other
Sony Ericsson phones. The name of the application basically speaks for
itself - you take a picture of someone (with or without the
application) and you can apply several warping filters. Photo Mate is a
perfect application for newcomers. It basically teaches you about using
the camera in your phone, and shows what it’s capable of doing with
before and after shots. The application includes a total of nine
“lessons”, although you’ll have to download some of them from your
phone if you want to make any use of them.
The file manager is just absolutely brilliant. It sorts the files by
type, so your camera shots are in one folder, your pictures in one
folder, music files in one folder, and so on. The file manager is also
tabbed so you can switch between the read source (all, memory card, and
phone memory) the displayed content. It works really well. The file
manager is capable of performing most standard tasks, such as copying
files, marking several files, renaming, moving, create folders, and so
on. You can also send files directly from the file manager via
Bluetooth, e-mail, MMS and - in some cases - SMS, or make use of the
menu links to edit the content (pictures and videos).
The calendar is good for creating detailed appointments and
reminders with notes, and searching through your calendar entries. It
can display the calendar in a few ways - day, week and month. It
automatically makes all Saturdays blue, and Sundays red to separate
these from the rest.
It is possible to sync your calendar and various other data via either SyncML or Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync.
Other organizer features include a well-working set of alarms,
ability to create tasks and notes (and put notes on the desktop), timer
and a stopwatch. It’s also got a memo feature that allows you to store
any information you’d like kept secret on your phone.
C902 also comes with a few localization services, including Google
Maps. It generally works well, although it’s obvious you’ll need an
external GPS to make use of all the menu items.
The Media application holds most of your media on the phone,
including photos, music, videos, games and web feeds. We’ll leave you
with a few screenshots for now, and talk about it later on in the
camera and music parts of the review in a bit.
Camera
C902’s camera sports a resolution of 5 mega pixels. It also features
auto focus, and it comes with a special flash on the back, by Sony
Ericsson dubbed Photoflash. This kind of LED flash is without
comparison the best I have ever seen - it is really powerful, and only
requires a short exposure, so you won’t get as blurry photos as you
would have got with a normal LED flash. Another thing I like about this
flash is that it doesn’t drastically change colours in photos taken in
bright daylight, and the flash somehow got fired. Had it been a xenon
flash, it would have made the daylight photo look like it was a night
photo. That doesn’t happen with the Photoflash LED.
The camera interface in C902 is by many a well-known interface. It
works great, and it’s easy to use. You can easily switch modes, or
access the settings, while still having the viewfinder in the
background. There is ‘a but’, though. The interface is generally
somewhat sluggish, which makes it no different from the overall
interface speed experience. Hopefully this can and will be fixed in
future software updates, as it’s just plain annoying to wait 2-3
seconds for menus to appear when you want to send your photos via
Bluetooth, or 3 seconds for the camera to load.
The following camera settings are available, of which most are available in video mode as well.
- Shoot mode - Normal, BestPic, Panorama, Frames
- Scenes - Auto, Twilight landscape, Landscape, Portrait, Beach/Snow, Sports, Document
- Picture size - 5 MP, 3 MP, 1 MP, VGA
- Focus - Auto, Face detection, Macro, Infinite
- Flash - Auto, Off
- Self-timer - Off, On
- Metering mode - Normal, Spot
- White balance - Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Fluorescent, Incandescent
- Effects - Off, Black & white, Negative, Sepia, Solarize
- Picture quality - Fine, Normal
- BestPic - Fast, Slow
- Review - On, Off
- Stabilizer - On, Off
- Add position - On, Off
- Save to - Mem. Card, Phone mem
- Auto rotate - On, Off
- Shutter sound - Sound 1, Sound 2, Sound 3, Sound 4, Off
- Vibration - On, Off
- Reset settings
In addition to these menu settings are also eight shortcuts around the display for switching between modes (camera, video recorder, and preview), focus settings, shoot mode settings, scenes settings, self-timer and flash settings. These are generally very responsive, and their placement makes them easy to use.
Now, let’s have a look at some of the best photo samples I managed to get out of the C902.
In terms of details, most people should be pleased with the C902,
especially if the conditions are good. If the conditions aren’t good,
and the lighting is bad, you will without doubt be disappointed with
the C902. Although the flash is better than regular LED flashes, it
simply cannot match a proper flash when it comes to freezing a photo.
As you’ll notice in the samples, there’s not really anything wrong with the details, it’s simply a matter of software.
And when it comes to software, C902 falls to the ground. The camera
software is simply not good enough, and it’s really not good when it
comes to dealing with light and in some cases also colours. Photos
often come out over-exposed and with faded colours. I have also noticed
software issues with the shutter speed, as well as the post-processing,
which can make photos look worse than they did before. The noise
reduction part of the software is not great either.
Having said so, the software is still better than the one in K850,
and C902’s photos are most commonly a tad better than the ones from
K850 in good lighting conditions. In bad lighting conditions, K850 will
win solely because of its xenon flash.
Videos are recorded in MP4 format (H.263 codec) in QVGA resolution,
320 x 240 pixels. C902 records at a video bitrate of approximately 450
Kbps, which is a rather high bitrate for this resolution. The framerate
is officially said to be 30 frames per second - we measured 28-29
frames per second, so that’s accepted. The video sample
can be downloaded here by right clicking and saving the file.
Your snaps and videos can be viewed in the Media application by
either changing from camera/video mode to view mode, or by accessing it
from the main menu. In here you can browse all the content, pass it on
to friends and family, add tags, zoom in on photos, view photos on a
map, if they’re geo-tagged (triangulation method only), edit photos and
videos, apply the PhotoFix corrections, or view your photos in a
slideshow.
Music
The music player in C902 is basically the Walkman 3 player without
the branding and a few gimmick features, such as SensMe and Shake
Control.
C902 supports decoding of audio codecs such as MP3, AAC, AAC+,
eAAC+, RealAudio 8, and several WMA versions. Most needs will be
covered, although some will be left with no support for their favourite
codec.
The user interface is similar to the Walkman one, which means it is
slick, quick, and easy to use. You’ve got a few settings to mess around
with, including equalizers; play modes, stereo widening, and auto
rotate settings.
I don’t think the majority of potential buyers would have any
problems with using the C902 as their main music player. I’m sure it
could replace lots of stand-alone players, as it offers a decent sound
quality (with a nice set of earphones!). If you want to use it as your
primary music player, you should probably look to get a better set of
earphones and possibly also a larger memory card.
The built-in FM radio is another great feature of the C902.
Graphically, it’s not as impressive as the one in the latest Walkman
phones, but the difference shouldn’t mean that much to you. You can use
the radio whenever the phone is connected to a headset or any other
accessory that can act as the radio antenna.
On the C902 you can automatically store up to 20 FM radio frequencies -
these are stored with whatever information is set available by the
radio stations, with the C902’s built-in RDS support. This means the
phone can show the name of the radio station, the name of the song
playing, and lots of other info texts, if supported by the stations.
RDS will also automatically update the frequency if a better one is
available. This all works well.
One of the coolest features about the phone and lots of Sony
Ericsson’s latest phones, which is also available when the radio is
turned on, is the TrackID service. It basically records a small bit of
a song, uploads it to a special server, and after a few seconds, you’ll
be redirected to a website with the song information, if the song you
recorded was in Gracenote’s huge database. The accuracy of this service
is really high, and it’s a very nice free feature, although you might
have to let go of a few pennies in data transfer costs if you haven’t
got a data plan.
Games
The C902 comes preloaded with three Java games.
Café Solitaire combines no less than twelve solitaire
games, including Klondike, Freecell, Spiderette, and Pyramid. To be
honest, I wasn’t really excited about this at first, but I then
realized that it’s really quite comprehensive, and it’s not bad looking
either. I also realized that it’s more than just a cards game; you can
actually create your own character, customize it and make it represent
yourself. To make it all just a little bit more interesting, you can
play the game with friends, win points, and upgrade your café.
Foto Quest Fishing is all about taking spectacular photos
underwater photos of all kinds of fish. The game is played at Paradise
Island, and you’ll be given your photo assignments by beach-owner Ula,
who’ll also be your judge when it comes to the quality of your photos,
how many fish you’ve managed to get in the frame, if there are any
disturbing objects, etc. It’s actually a cool game, although I would
have liked it if it was played in landscape mode, and you could use the
actual camera shutter key to snap the photos in the game.
Need for Speed Pro Street is a really nice 3D racing game
that makes use of the built-in accelerometer in the C902. This means
you can steer the cars either by the d-pad or by moving, tilting and
playing around with the phone. This way of gaming is rather nice, and
seems intuitive for most, although it takes a minute or two to get the
hang of. It can not only be played in portrait mode, also landscape
mode, which generally works better for racing games. This also helps a
bit on C902’s relatively small display.
Web browser and connections
C902 is a quad-band GSM phone with EDGE support, as well as support
for the 2100 MHz UMTS and HSDPA networks. No love for America in this
one, it seems. In terms of Bluetooth connectivity, C902 supports
Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR, which means you’ll get fast data transfers around
140 kilobytes per second. It’s also got support for the A2DP profile,
so you can stream music wirelessly in stereo via Bluetooth.
You can connect the phone to your computer via Bluetooth or USB. In
file storage mode, you’ll get the fastest connection for file
transfers. There’s no infrared connection support in C902.
The web browser is the good Access NetFront, version 3.4. Although
it generally performs rather well, we’d still prefer Opera Mini any
day. like Opera Mini, NetFront 3.4 includes a mouse cursor which makes
it so much easier to browse websites. There’s also a nice full size
overview feature included, so you can pan around the sections of the
website you’re visiting.
NetFront 3.4 supports CSS, HTML, xHTML, and light Javascripts. It cannot display any Flash content.
The homepage in NetFront 3.4 is a custom one, created by Sony
Ericsson. It provides easy Internet searching (Google), a URL bar,
links to your RSS feeds, browsing history and your bookmarks.
If you’re visiting a website that supports RSS feeds, such as this
blog, you’ll be notified with a small RSS icon at the top of the
browser window. You can then add the RSS feed, if you want to subscribe
to it. It’s that simple! If you don’t like to go to the RSS feed menu
each time you want to check your feeds for updates, you can place the
feeds directly on the standby screen, and set it to automatically
update every one hour or whatever time interval you may set. It’s a
brilliant solution.
like many other Sony Ericsson phones, the C902 supports most common
e-mail services, including Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail, although
you’ll have to manually set up everything yourself (either IMAP4 or
POP3), if you choose not to make use of Sony Ericsson’s web-based
set-up.
Contacts
The C902 has got room for up to 1000 contacts, and 7000 numbers in
total. I don’t think I have heard of anyone with more than a thousand
contacts in their phonebook. Each contact can be saved with the
following info entries;
- Name
- Number (Mobile, Mobile (private), Mobile (work), Home, Work, Fax, and Other)
- E-mail (up to 3 e-mail addresses)
- Web address
- Picture
- Contact-specific ringtone
- Voice command
- Work information (Title, Company, Street, City, State, Zip code, and Country)
- Personal information (Street, City, State, Zip code, and Country)
- Info (a note)
- Birthday (can be added to the calendar)
In my opinion, that should be more than enough for most. All of this can be synced with your computer, or sent wirelessly to another phone via Bluetooth or alike. You can of course also create your own business card with your contact details, and send this to fellow workers or whoever you may want to send it to. Again, this can be done via Bluetooth, e-mail, MMS or SMS.
C902 offers contact backups, so you won’t have to worry if you ever
lose your contacts, one way or another. It is possible to set up a set
of nine speed dials, and of course also contact groups, if you’re
looking to send a message to all your buddies at work or your entire
family at once.
Messaging
You can send and receive both MMS and SMS text messages on the C902.
The phone is also capable of handling your voice calls and messages for
you, although I haven’t tried this.
Both the MMS and SMS message editors are simply ingenious. The T9
dictionary - and the use of it - is also miles ahead of any other
solutions on the market, period! With support for EMS, you can also add
picture smilies, sound effects, animations, and small black/white
pictures in your SMS messages. If you’ve set up a set of templates, or
want to use one of the default ones, you can also quickly add one or
several of these without ever leaving the editor. You can also add a
large variety of special symbols; make use of copy/pasting; change
writings options, such as the writing language, dictionary, word
predictions and word suggestions. If the word you’re trying to write is
not in the dictionary, you can of course add it to the dictionary, and
you’ll never have to think about it again.
Calls
Calls can be made by either dialling a contact from the excellent
built-in phonebook, or by dialling the phone number on the standby
screen. If you choose to do the latter, the C902 will also
automatically search through your list of contacts for any usable
information based on the key combination you’ve pressed, as well as act
as a completely regular phone. Confused? Let’s do an example.
I’m looking to call someone, whose number happens to be in my
phonebook. As I press the following key combination, the C902 will
automatically search and filter the entire database of contacts based
on my inputs; two (for ‘C’), six (for ‘o’), and six (for ‘n’). So,
basically we’ve just entered what could be part of a phone number, but
we’ve also just searched for any contacts matching this certain key
combination - in this case my test contact entry named “Contact”. It’s
bloody clever, and it works a treat, although it may get a bit slow if
you’ve got lots and lots of contacts.
You can do regular voice calls as well as video calls on C902. I
haven’t tried out the video call part myself, as I simply don’t use it
on a daily basis, but the voice call part is very good. Because C902
features two microphones, the audio is of high quality. The earphone
call volume is sufficient for me, and I didn’t notice much noise on the
line either, which is good.
I haven’t experienced any network reception problems during the review period.
The call manager holds a total of up to 30 calls. In my opinion, the
call manager could easily have been enhanced a bit. It would indeed
have been nice to check the length of a call, or at least to also
include when the call ended.
Calls are separated in four tabs, one for each kind of call, based on
whether it was an incoming or outgoing call, and if it was an incoming
call, if it was missed. The first tab in line - yet the last to be
spoken about - works as the overview-tab.
Conclusion
C902’s main disadvantages lie in the hardware lacks. There’s no GPS,
and there’s no WLAN support. On the camera side of things, there’s no
xenon flash either, although in its defence the LED actually does a
good job. The last few things would be its somewhat small display, and
the lack of support for American 3G networks. Apart from this, we’re
talking small software issues, that can be resolved in future updates.
I quite like everything else about the phone. Its build quality and
quality feel is just amazing, it supports all European networks, it
features speedy Bluetooth transfers, it works very well as a phone, and
it’s got a decent camera as well.
I find the price of C902 pretty fitting. It’s lower than the initial
price of K850, although it is a slightly better phone. It retails for
about £250 in Denmark unlocked and SIM-free. That doesn’t seem like a
lot for one of Sony Ericsson’s best feature phones.
The battery would generally last about four days of normal use. This
seems like a nice battery performance, and it should be OK for most.
When it all comes down to it, is it recommendable? It depends. If
you’re a heavy texter, then no - you’ll end up hating the keypad. If
you’re in search of an advanced camera phone, you might want to wait a
few months for C905 instead. This will be a bit pricier, but it’s also
a lot better. If you need a camera phone now, C902 should do fine.
If you’re simply looking for a phone capable of doing a bit of
everything, I think C902 could be a nice choice, although there would
be many other alternatives in that category.
[Review based on firmware revision R3BA035]
|
SPMark Java Benchmark
|
Original article published at The Unofficial Sony Ericsson Blog Tags : Sony Ericsson C902