Introduction
Besides C702, this is another Cyber-shot model that has been announced in Barcelona. The model numbering makes it clear that it is on a higher level of the imaginary SE-pyramid than its dust- and water-resistant brother, it is near to the topmost position; only Xperia and G900 are situated above it. However, currently the most powerful member of the Cyber-shot family is C902, there’s no doubt about that.
Although almost every manufacturer is trying to give easy-to-remember names to their phones (besides the usual model numbering), the best in this matter are Sony Ericsson and HTC. Ultra Music (by Samsung), Xpressmusic (by Nokia), or Mandarin Duck (by Alcatel) don’t sound as good as Walkman and Cyber-shot. The success of Sony’s products has been exploited in a smart manner; from a marketing point of view the manufacturer distinguishes itself from the others very cleverly.
The smaller member of the new C series is resistant to dust and water: the subject of our current review doesn’t have such features, in return elegance is emphasized. The device, which steps on the path of K850i (but it doesn’t take the throne from it, for some reasons), is the second phone from the manufacturer to have a 5 megapixel camera, but this is not the only thing that shows that no company is in an urge to make 7-8 megapixel lens. Maybe it’s better this way, at first they should make something really spectacular at this resolution (and we’re sending our best wishes to Samsung G600) and then the race could start again, which has already lost its meaning, as putting a camera with more than 5 Mpix resolution into a phone is just commercial gibberish.
But this is not what the story is all about nowadays, as everyone is speaking about improvements in user experience; the effect of iPhone on the world of mobile phones is easy to be felt, although C902 fortunately uses the good old shapes and buttons.
Hirdetés
Exterior
C902 is a really elegant little bastard. The primarily black coloring suggests gloominess, makes the phone look a bit thinner, even though there’s no need to optically “enhance” the size of the 10.5 mm thick phone: it’s slim enough anyway. The dark case is made pleasant to the eyes by the rational and gentle use of silvery elements: this is how the rim of the navigation key, the labels on the top and bottom and the stripe crossing the back cover look like. A characteristic feature of C902 is the presence of three silvery stripes running along the sides of the handset: this is stuffed by the volume control and the camera’s exposure button on the right, while we can see the standard, unprotected data connector on the left. On top the stripes are not broken, while on the bottom the only thing we can see, if we have some really sharp eyes, the tiny black hole of the microphone.
On the front, C902 makes the impression of a proportionally built and rigorously designed phone. Every button is where it should be, only the call handling keys, sitting near the navigation controls, have a rubber-like coating, the other buttons have a shiny black and somewhat slippery surface, which might seem strange at first, but even the fact that keys have to be pressed lightly, doesn’t make getting used to them a hard thing.
The numeric keypad has a green-white backlight, which spreads on to the function buttons too. However, these turn blue if we turn on the camera. For this we have to pull the top of the phone upwards and so the part above the display moves away from its previous position and a ~1 cm wide gap is made. This made me think a lot at first, when I was looking at the front of the phone, as three small holes have appeared and I’ve been looking as hell to find out what they do, and then I realized: there’s nothing new in this, only the top of the phone has been somewhat covering the secondary camera, the light sensor and the speaker.
Sliding the phone has more interesting results on the back, as the 5 megapixel lens appears, accompanied by a small mirror and a flash, of which we can immediately find out that it’s not xenon – and so this is where K850i has remained a leader. The upper part of the phone’s sides is reticular, as this is where we should be holding it when sliding it open. The sample phone has been a bit stuck, but I had seen one that functioned perfectly, so there won’t be any problem with this. It’s really hard to take off the back cover, and putting it back is even harder, but we are forced to tamper with it more than necessary, as the socket of the M2 expansion card is hidden under it.
Assembly quality is great I just simply couldn’t make the device to go cracking, and we can even know about the back cover that it’s made of metal – but only after we take it off. That’s because it’s soft plastic on the outside, only the interior part is which shines in silver and rattles when dropped, thus making it clear, that it’s made of metal.
Basic functions
I felt the 2” QVGA display a bit too slim. There would have been room for a larger screen, but then the surrounding touch-sensitive surface would have to go: I would let it go. I won’t go praising the menu this time, however, as it’s the same that W760i and C702 have, so let’s see the short facts for those who haven’t yet read the reviews of the aforementioned models (we invite them to catch up anytime): the main screen can have other views than the usual icons (like rotating icons and list view with a single, large icon), some stuff have more animation and/or look cooler, RSS and games are now in the media menu. Other functions are where they used to be, in a logical and easy to understand structure, with a high level of customizability. There are lots of themes, so there’s nothing that would limit us in coloring the screen the way we want it.
No surprises in the phonebook either. We can have 1000 entries, with a maximum of 7000 of additional information: it should be enough for a while. As all Sony Ericsson phone, C902 also prefers if phonebook contacts are stored in the phone’s memory, but the phone can make a backup copy to the SIM card on every change if we would like to. The tabbed view has been present in the manufacturer’s models since a long time ago, while the list of usable data is appropriate for the needs of the everyday user.
Messaging is professional as usual. Predictive text entry helps when entering texts, MMS messages can have a maximum size of 300KB. The email client handles attachments as usual (although the phone cannot open Office documents), there are no signs of size limits, it starts sending a mail even if I attach 10 MB of pictures and the only available network is GPRS.
The calendar has week and month views, in case of the latter one, the table is colored based on the events and if we want to do two things at the same time, it warns us and continues coloring. The alarm clock has the usual settings; the code memory, the calculator, the stopwatch and the countdown timer are here as usual, so we won’t see anything surprising in C902.
Camera
I would like to say this in advance: if this camera will be used in the final model, that hits stores, than it will be a fatal failure. That’s because the 5 megapixel autofocus camera makes pictures with hell of a noise; I even tried a newer firmware version, but there was no change in quality. I think the time of a comparative test is getting closer, but only when this phone becomes commercially available and we might just wait until the first software update comes out. Here are the test pictures below, but for the time being we shouldn’t be judging based on these. (It’s interesting that the C902 that gsmarena.com has been testing makes pictures with the same amount of noise and blur, but they were happy with them.)
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After opening the phone, the camera’s software is launched automatically. It needs some time until we can see the viewfinder, during this time we can take a look at the blue stripe lighting up on the back and the similarly blue touch-sensitive icons surrounding the display. There are eight icons over here; every one of these is a shortcut to a function (flash, macro, photo/video switch, gallery, etc.), and these are really useful, but people usually start using the well-known Cyber-shot menu, which doesn’t need the touch-sensitive icons.
The handset has face recognition, which tries to focus where the software senses a human head. This feature worked pretty well. There is video recording too, at a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels, at a speed of 30 fps. C902 has no xenon flash; instead it has two powerful LEDs. These are enough for short-ranged photos, but they don’t provide enough light for larger areas. There is a shake filter (of course it’s software only), in order to get the proper picture, we have the BestPic technology that takes 9 pictures, quickly one after the other.
Other multimedia
In means of music, the phone has the features of any Walkman. The multimedia menu still sorts content nicely; music tracks are sorted by ID3 tags. Amongst the presets of the equalizer we can see MegaBass too, so C902 makes a great musical phone with a decent headset. Additionally the phone has an FM radio, which can display RDS information too.
The multimedia menu might be the first place where the built-in gyroscope has a meaning: if we rotate the phone, than the displayed picture is also rotated shortly after. From the list of games Need For Street is the one which excels from this point of view, as we can control the car by only hitting the phone, so we can offer some really funny moments to people travelling with us on the bus.
The list of applications only contained AccuWeather for weather forecasts and Facewarp for having some fun with faces, but this list can change until the phone is launched, mainly because functions will be localized for different countries. PhotoDJ, VideoDJ and MusicDJ are included, however, on every C902, the three “DJs” are practically a basic element of all Sony Ericsson phones.
Data transfer, battery
GPRS, EDGE, UMTS and HSDPA are all here, which is really expected from a top phone. The built-in HTML browser offers nothing new, it’s a bit basic, compared even to Opera Mini, but it’s still a fine one. It has landscape view and page breaking by width and that’s about it.
For local communication we have 2.0 USB and Bluetooth of the same version. I had expected more from the battery, although C702 has already been a small disappointment. Neither does this one can take it for more than two days without a recharge and it didn’t even want to take power from my third-party charger (which worked perfectly before), it only accepted the original one.
Conclusion? If we don’t take the camera into consideration (as it is worthless for the time being) I have to say that C902 is not what I expected. I don’t really find much sense in the touch-sensitive buttons; the numeric keys are strange, so, once more, we cannot say that it’s a real innovation, I personally find K850i as a perfect replacement for this model. Of course the metal case is a good thing, assembly quality is great, but I don’t know if this will be enough nowadays. You can start throwing your stones, but C902 gets no award from me.
Bog
Translated by Szaszati
Specifications
| Sony Ericsson C902 | ||
 | General | |
| Technology | GSM, UMTS, HSDPA | |
| Size | 108 x 49 x 10.5 mm | |
| Weight | 107 grams | |
| Colors | black, red (Swift Black, Luscious Red) | |
| Display | ||
| Display diagonal | 2“ | |
| Display resolution | 240 x 320 pixels | |
| Display type | TFT | |
| Number of colors | 256K | |
| Memory | ||
| Phonebook capacity | 1000 | |
| SMS memory / max. MMS size | dynamic / 300KB | |
| Internal memory | 160 MB | |
| Memory expandability | M2 | |
| Data transfer | ||
| Frequency bands | 850/900/1800/1900 MHz | |
| GPRS / EDGE | Class 10 (4+1/3+2) / Class 10 (236.8 kbps) | |
| UMTS / HSDPA | present (384 kbps) / present (3.6 Mbps) | |
| IrDA / Bluetooth | none / 2.0 (A2DP too) | |
| WiFi | none | |
| USB | 2.0 | |
| Push-to-talk / RSS | none / present | |
| GPS receiver | none | |
| Basic functions | ||
| Profiles | present | |
| Vibra function | present | |
| Built-in handsfree | present | |
| Voice calling / voice commands | present / present | |
| Sound recorder | present | |
| Alarm clock | present, also when turned off | |
| Predictive text entry | T9 | |
| Software | ||
| Platform | SE | |
| WAP / HTML browser | present / present | |
| E-mail client | present (POP3, IMAP4, authenticated) | |
| Java | present, MIDP 2.0 | |
| Games | 1 | |
| Currency converter | present | |
| Extra software | VideoDJ, PhotoDJ, MusicDJ, TrackID, AccuWeather, Facewarp | |
| Multimedia | ||
| Main camera | 5 megapixels, autofocus | |
| Secondary camera | present | |
| Video recording | present, QVGA, 30fps | |
| Music player | present, runs in background too | |
| Equalizer | present | |
| FM radio | present - RDS | |
| Battery | ||
| Main battery | 930 mAh Li-Ion | |
| Standby time | 400 hours | |
| Talk time | 540 minutes | |
| Other | ||
| face recognition, BestPic | ||
