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Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot C905a review: Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot C905a

Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot C905a

Nicole Lee Former Editor
Nicole Lee is a senior associate editor for CNET, covering cell phones, Bluetooth headsets, and all things mobile. She's also a fan of comic books, video games, and of course, shiny gadgets.
Nicole Lee
8 min read

8.3

Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot C905a

The Good

The Sony Ericsson C905a has a good 8.1-megapixel camera, 3G/HSDPA speeds, quad-band support, a music player that supports audiobooks and podcasts, and it has good call quality, too.

The Bad

The Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot C905a doesn't have a 3.5-millimeter headset jack. Unlike its international counterpart, it does not have built-in Wi-Fi.

The Bottom Line

If you want a high-quality camera phone from AT&T, you can't go wrong with the Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot C905a.

We don't typically see high-end megapixel camera phones from Sony Ericsson here in the U.S. unless they're unlocked, and as a result, prohibitively expensive. So it was a welcome surprise to us when we heard that the Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot C905a would make its way to a U.S. carrier, namely AT&T. The Cyber-shot C905a is, indeed, a fantastic camera phone. It does its Cyber-shot branding proud with a tricked-out 8.1-megapixel camera, a modern design, and plenty of other great features like stereo Bluetooth, GPS, and a music player. There is a catch, however: while the European version has built-in Wi-Fi, the U.S. version does not. Still, together with quad-band support and 3G, the C905a is definitely one of the best camera phones subsidized by a U.S. carrier. Together with quad-band support and 3G, the C905a is definitely one of the best camera phones subsidized by a U.S. carrier. The Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot C905a is available for $179.99 after a two-year service agreement.

Design
The Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot C905a has a very sharp and sleek style that really highlights its Cyber-shot namesake. In fact, from the back, the phone looks more like a point-and-shoot camera thanks to the sliding camera lens cover. Measuring 4.1 inches long by 1.9 inches wide by 0.7 inch thick, the C905a is quite bulky. It's curved at the top and the bottom, has sharp corners, and is wrapped in a matte silver chassis with hints of dark gray. Weighing in at 4.8 ounces, it has a nice heft when held in the hand. The sliding mechanism feels solid as well, and engages in a satisfying click each time you slide it up or down.

The 2.4-inch scratch-resistant display on the C905a is absolutely stunning. It supports around 262,000 colors, which results in great-looking images and is especially helpful when using the display as a camera viewfinder. It has a simple menu interface similar to other AT&T phones, and can be organized in grid, rotating, or single icon view. You can adjust the size of the clock on the home screen and the brightness of the display, but not the backlight time.


The Sony Ericsson C905a's display makes for a great camera viewfinder.

Underneath the display is the navigation array, which consists of two soft keys, a Send and End/Power key, an Activity menu key, the Clear key, and a square navigation toggle with a center selection key. When pressed, the Activity menu key brings up a pop-up menu of four tabs, each of which list new events, currently running apps, application shortcuts, and Internet shortcuts, respectively. The square toggle doubles as four user-defined shortcuts and the middle key leads to AT&T's Media Net browser in standby mode. In camera mode, the toggle lights up in blue, which illuminates four camera function icons--they correspond to the exposure setting, the flash setting, the self-timer, and the focus mode.

Directly above the display are two keys, one on the upper left and one on the upper right. In standby mode, the left key corresponds to the last picture or video in the album, while the right key leads to the camera album itself. In camera mode, the left key is a shortcut to the shoot mode settings; while the right key lets you change the scene mode options. In between the two keys are a light sensor plus the speaker.


The Sony Ericsson C905a has a slide-out keypad.

Slide the phone up and you'll reveal the number keypad. The keypad is quite roomy, and there's a raised line between each row for additional texture. We wish there was more delineation between each key and that the keypad didn't have such high side walls, but as we had no problems dialing or texting, it's a pretty decent keypad on the whole.

On the left side of the phone are the charger/headset jack and memory card slot, which takes Sony's proprietary Memory Stick Micro (M2) format. We were disappointed that the C905a doesn't come with a 3.5mm headset jack. Though the recent W995a was the first-ever Sony Ericsson phone to have a 3.5mm headset jack, we just wished Sony Ericsson would roll that design out to all of its phones. On the right side are the volume controls, which also double as zoom controls in camera mode, a camera album shortcut, a camera mode key that switches between camera and video, and the camera shutter key. The shutter key can be pressed halfway to focus in on the subject.

On the back of the phone is, of course, the camera lens, complete with the sliding lens cover. When you slide the cover down, you'll automatically put the phone in camera mode. There's a very bright LED flash above the lens, and a tiny self-portrait mirror to the side of it as well.

Features
The C905a has a generous 1,000-entry phone book, and each entry can hold seven phone numbers, three e-mail addresses, a company name and job title, two street addresses, a Web URL, a birthdate, and notes. You can also save callers to groups, pair them with one of eight MP3 ringtones, a MIDI ringtone, or one of four video ringtones. You can use your own music or video files as caller ID if you wish. You can also customize a contact's message alert tone with one of eight choices, or just leave it silent.

Basic features include text and multimedia messaging, a speakerphone, a vibrate mode, a calculator, a timer, a stopwatch, a calendar, a tasks list, a notepad, a password saver, five different alarm clocks, and a voice recorder. There are also a few fun features like PhotoDJ, VideoDJ, and MusicDJ, which let you remix and edit your own images, video files, and audio files. You can also multitask in between applications, even during a call.

More advanced features include USB mass storage, PC syncing, instant messenger (AIM, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger), stereo Bluetooth, the MediaNet mobile Web browser, and mobile e-mail (with support for providers like Yahoo Mail, AOL, AIM, Windows Live Hotmail, AT&T Yahoo, BellSouth, Comcast, Earthlink, Juno, Mindspring, and NetZero). There's no setting for your own POP3 or IMAP server, however. The C905a also has assisted GPS, and with that comes AT&T Navigator for turn-by-turn directions and the Where application that lets you know about local businesses like the closest coffee shop or the nearest gas station.

The C905a comes with high-speed 3G/HSDPA, which gives it access to AT&T broadband services like Cellular Video, AT&T's video streaming service from a variety of content providers like CNN, ESPN, and HBO, and AT&T Video Share, which lets you stream live one-way video to another Video Share-compatible phone. While we enjoyed the fast 3G speeds, we wished the C905a came with Wi-Fi like the C905i.

If you're a music fan, you'll also like AT&T Mobile Music, AT&T's gateway portal to music applications like Music ID (a song identification service), mobile XM radio, streaming music videos, and the ability to purchase and download songs from Napster and eMusic. A song is typically $1.99, or $7.49 for five tracks. You also need a Memory Stick Micro (M2) to buy and download a song. There's even an FM radio tuner built in.

The music player interface is easy to use, and we especially like that there's a separate category for audiobooks and for podcasts as well. Aside from downloading music, you can also load music onto the C905a via the included USB cable. Of course you can also create and edit your own playlists and set songs on repeat or shuffle.


The Sony Ericsson C905a has an 8.1-megapixel camera.

But the biggest feature on the C905a is the 8.1-megapixel camera. It can take pictures in four different resolutions, two quality settings, five color effects, and five white balance choices. Other settings include spot metering, a self-timer, red-eye reduction, macro mode, an infinite focus mode that disables autofocus for long-distance pictures, 16x digital zoom, an image stabilizer, four shutter sounds plus a silent option, and autorotate. There's also flash mode, which you can turn on permanently to act as a flashlight. We also like that the camera has GPS geolocation, so you can find out where you were when you took a particular photo.

One of the features we particular liked was face detection, which automatically focuses in on a subject's face indicated by a green square. We also liked all the different shoot modes; smart contrast automatically sets the correct contrast for you, while BestPic takes seven photos in succession to let you pick the best ones to keep. The different scene modes are also helpful in taking photos in specific situations like twilight, landscape, portrait, beach/snow, sports, and even a mode specially for taking macro shots of documents.


The Sony Ericsson C905a takes very good photos.

There's also a built-in camcorder that can record clips in either 20-second bursts for MMS or a longer clip in normal mode. Editing options are similar to that of the still camera. Photo quality was quite impressive. Images didn't look blurry at all, and colors look very vibrant and bright. Video quality was only average though, but it's OK for viewing on YouTube or sharing with friends.

The C905a comes with a slew of games and applications, like mobile banking, My-Cast Weather reports, WikiMobile (Wikipedia for mobile use), Yellowpages, World Clock 3D, Bubble Bash, I-play Bowling, Ms. Pac-Man, Need for Speed, Turbo Jet Ski 3, and plenty more. If you want to download more, you can get them via the MediaNet browser. The same goes for getting more graphics or alert tones for customizing your phone.

Performance
We tested the quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900) world phone in San Francisco using the AT&T service. We were pleased with the call quality on the whole. Callers heard us loud and clear without any interference, though they did hear a bit of ambient noise, even in relatively quiet environments like in the office. They could still tell we were on a cell phone, but that didn't deter the voice quality, which they said sounded quite natural. Speakerphone calls were surprisingly good--callers couldn't even tell we were on a speakerphone. Automated voice recognition systems recognized our voice commands without a hitch.

On our end, call quality was generally quite good except for the occasional static blip. There was also those annoying GSM clicks every once in a while, but that's quite typical. Incoming sound quality on the speakerphone sounded a little harsh and tinny, but there was still plenty of volume. Similarly, music quality over the speakers was lacking in bass and sounded rather weak. We would definitely recommend using a stereo headset for better audio quality.

We found the 3G speeds quite zippy; loading simple WAP pages took only 10 or so seconds, and downloading a 1.5MB song took around 40 seconds. We also streamed a couple video clips from AT&T's video streaming service with very little buffering time, around 5 seconds at the most. Video quality was average. Though the 262,000 colors on the display helps in improving the image quality of the video, they're far from perfect. We still spotted the occasional artifact and blurry shot. This was especially noticeable in video with a lot of action movements.

The Sony Ericsson Cyber-Shot C905a has a rated battery life of 9 hours talk time in GSM, and 3.5 hours with UMTS. It has a 16.6 days standby time on regular GSM and 14.6 days standby time with UMTS. Our tests showed an impressive talk time of 11 hours and 23 minutes. According to the FCC, it has a digital SAR of 1.12 watts per kilogram.

8.3

Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot C905a

Score Breakdown

Design 8Features 9Performance 8