SOny Ericson C905

Sony Ericsson blurs the line between a full-featured smartphone and a basic phone and comes away with positive results. and this had attracts me the most …

Not saying on other things, C905 has everything most smartphones come with these days — support for HSDPA, Bluetooth, GPS and even WiFi, together with the applications that take advantage of the hardware.

On top of that, the C905 is also a Cyber-shot branded Sony Ericsson phone and comes with a whopping 8.1-megapixel autofocus digicam with a Xenon flash built in.


The nifty sliding mechanism of the Sony Ericsson C905 always sits flush with the rest of the phone’s body, minimising the chances of the cover catching against something in your pocket. When you consider just what Sony Ericsson has managed to pack in, it’s actually relatively small compared to most of the competition, and as you’ll soon see, this phone has a few little tricks up its sleeve as well.

The package

The C905 has quite a number of accessories packed into the box. Apart from the phone, charger and ubiquitous wired headset, you get a USB sync cable and a USB card ­reader for the Memory Stick Micro card.

All in all, a pretty good bundle.

As far as the phone functions go, the C905 is no slouch and comes with everything you’d expect from a high-end phone — HSDPA, UMTS 2100, quad-band GSM and of course support for Bluetooth headsets, etc. Call quality was good and the speakerphone function is louder and clearer than on my now aging K618i.

The C905 is a reasonably fast phone in terms of menu response — it’s not the fastest, but certainly faster than on smartphones with true operating systems. Response times are quite ­satisfactory to me and require only one or two button clicks to get to the SMS application or call and contact lists.

As I mentioned before, one thing that the C905 is not lacking is in hardware features and this deserves quite a bit of looking at.

First off, the C905 has built-in A-GPS that comes with both Google Mapsand a trial version of Wayfinder Navigatorwhich offers voice turn-by-turn navigation.

Next up is WiFi — on the ­hardware front, the WiFi on the phone works extremely well and seamlessly ­transfers between WiFi hotspots and 3G/HSDPA when you’re surfing.

The C905 produces perfectly usable pictures and is actually not bad for a phone, although as expected, ­cramming 8.1-million pixels into a sensor smaller than your thumbnail produces an image with a lot of obvious noise reduction.

While I would have liked more control of the ISO settings, the camera itself does automatically increase the ISO when shooting in low light conditions.

The Xenon flash works well and exposures were generally spot on when the flash is on.
As for GPS and the 8.1-megapixel camera well that’s just the icing on the cake. and that’s my next aim