Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot C905: A Camera Comes To Town
July 20 2009 Categorized Under: Cell Phones Tags; 8.1 megapixel, best camera phone, c905, camera phone, cyber-shot, ericsson, sony, sony cyber-shot 3 Commented
The Sony Ericsson partnership has a built a name for itself by bringing out quality phones in the Walkman and Cyber-Shot series. This new Cyber-Shot series C905 phone is no exception. It is a brilliant phone and does complete justice to the Cyber-shot brand. A brand that is all about great cameras, even if they are consumer focused. I don’t see them competing with a Nikon or Canon anytime soon but that is taking it too far.
The C905 is on the bulkier side of the size divide, so it almost looks like a Cyber-Shot point and shoot camera from behind. But make no mistake about it – this is a capable phone. Rather, it is a capable camera with a good phone built around it. The one thing that you will notice about this phone is that it has a lot of buttons.
Directly below the screen, you will see six buttons, three on each side with a d-pad in the middle. The top button on each side is a soft key that works with whatever the context is on the screen. The middle key on the left is the call/send key and the one on the right is the end/reject key. The lowest button on the left is the ‘menu’ key and the one on the right is the ‘clear’ or backspace key, denoted by the ‘c’ symbol on it.
The D-Pad has a central button and four-way clicking as usual. It has four icons inscribed on it. We will get to those soon. During general use, the center button will bring up a predefined menu. It will be your carrier’s menu if it is a locked phone. The four-way navigation works as four user-defined shortcuts in standby mode. The entire setup changes when you are in camera mode.
In camera mode, the d-pad glows blue and the icons light up. The four directions then represent the exposure setting, the flash setting, the self-timer and the focus mode. So as you can understand, this phone offers you a lot of features to tweak your photos with before you snap them.
Right above the screen, on what can be called the ‘forehead’ of the phone, are two buttons on each side. While the phone is in stand-by, the top-left button will take you to the last viewed video or photo and the top-right one will take you to the camera album. While in camera-mode, the left one takes you to shoot mode settings and the right one takes you to the scene mode settings. Between the buttons are the earpiece speaker and the light sensor.
The left side of the phone has a combination headset/charger port and a memory card slot. The memory card slot requires Sony’s proprietary M2 (Memory Stick micro) format cards. The combination headset/charger port remains an annoyance. This does not merely mean that you can’t use the headset while charging. It also means that you cannot use a standard 3.5mm headphone jack equipped headphone with it.
The right side has volume controls that double as zoom controls in camera mode, a camera album shortcut key, a camera mode (still photo/video) toggle key and a shutter button. The shutter key mimics a features found in professional cameras – you can press it halfway to focus on the subject.
The Sony Ericsson Cyber-Shot C905 is a slider phone. You have to slide it up to reveal the hidden keypad. The keypad is a good one, with ridges separating each row for added tactile benefits. The keys could have been a bit more individualistic instead of being so very attached to each other. But the main problem is the inset nature of the keypad that has high walls on each side. This makes it a bit inconvenient to use. But other than that it is quite usable, as users have reported.
The Cyber-shot also has a bevy of features on the software side. It has a large 1000 entry phonebook where every entry can have up to 7 phone numbers, 3 email addresses, 2 street addresses, a company name plus job title, a web url, a birth date and notes. As usual, you can assign contacts to groups. There are MIDI ringtones, mp3 ringtones and video ringtones. They can all be assigned to entries.
It has text messaging, multimedia messaging, vibrate mode, calculator, notepad, a speakerphone, etc.
It has USB mass storage mode, PC syncing, IM client (AIM, Yahoo, and Live), Blue tooth with A2DP (Stereo audio support), mobile email (supporting AOL, Yahoo, AIM, Windows Live, etc.). There is no POP3 or IMAP support. It has assisted GPS navigation though.
The Cyber-Shot C905 comes with 3G/HSDPA. So you can enjoy streaming content from all the providers you have access to depending on your carrier.
The Camera of course has the highlight of the phone. The included camera is 8.1 megapixel. It gives you the choice to take photos in four different resolutions with two quality settings, five color effects and five white balance options. It also has a macro mode, red correction, spot metering, self-timer, infinite zoom for long distance shots (disables auto focus), 16x Digital zoom, image stabilizer, four shutter sounds and also an option for silent snaps. The included Xenon flash can be kept permanently on to act as a flashlight. Geo tagging is also supported through the included GPS system, so it will automatically show up on you photo metadata.
It has a face detection feature that automatically focuses on a person’s face, which is shown by a green square around the face.
The quality of the photos is absolutely stellar for a camera phone. The colors are rich and everything is very sharp and crisp. The built in video recorder can do a 20 second clip to send as MMS or normal continuous recording till memory permits.
The phone has a 9hours talk time and 16.6 days standby time rated battery. This means you can get through the day on one full charge.
Overall, if you want a great camera phone, this is the one to have.
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There are many rocking features of Sony Ericsson C905. It has a 8.1 MP camera. The performance of this cell phone is amazing. The feature of stereo Bluetooth is very good. The design is very appealing to the eyes.
free phone now