Phone rating: 
In a nutshell: Sony Ericsson's new flagship Cyber-Shot phone lives up our high expectations. This is an outstandingly good camera phone with a 5 megapixel camera with face-detection autofocus, LED flash, and easy to use camera controls. It also packs in a music player, FM radio, 3G HSDPA, Bluetooth and loads of memory. In addition it's a superslim stylish handset available in Black or Red. We have deducted one star because of occasional freezing and crashing in early releases of this model.
Best buy: *Free* with half-price line rental from Dialaphone (Black) or Dialaphone (Red).
The C902 is the first in a brand new range of Sony Ericsson phones: "C" for Cyber-Shot™. Previously all Cyber-Shot phones were part of the "K" series, and the C902 is the replacement for the Sony Ericsson K850i. The Cyber-Shot phones have been enormously successful over the past few years, but we felt that SE had made a few mistakes in recent models with dodgy keypads and unreliable firmware. It looked like SE had hit a rough patch, so let's hope that with the C series they can leave all that behind and move on to greater things. The C902 is the flagship Cyber-Shot model, and so our expectations are high.
Physically, the C902 seems to be back to the old Sony Ericsson style at its best. It's a classic-style handset, but ultra-slim at just 10.5mm. The keypad is a good old-fashioned one that has good-size square keys giving tactile feedback and enabling fast texting. Hooray! We're also delighted to find a 5-way navigation pad that just works. Looks like SE have learned some hard lessons about keypads and have gone back to a design that works. It feels like a quality handset too, with a combination of metal and plastic, and an elegant finish. It's available in a choice of Black or Red, and both colour schemes look very nice indeed.
The screen is slightly smaller than the K850i's. This is because of the touch-sensitive shortcuts added to both sides of the screen. These are used to activate the camera and switch between still and video. They can also change the autofocus mode, flash and other camera settings. We have to say that these work really well in our view. As camera phones become more and more sophisticated, accessing the functionality from a phone becomes more of a challenge for the user (it's not a dedicated digital camera after all.) The C902 shortcuts are an excellent solution to this problem and give the user a lot more control over the camera settings than most other camera phones. It's a shame that the display size has been reduced to make way for the shortcuts, but at least the screen has the same high resolution as previous Cyber-Shots (240 x 320 pixels). It's a bright and sharp display that works well in most lighting conditions.
Let's take a peek at the camera next. The camera is actually concealed beneath a mini sliding cover. When you slide the cover open, the phone switches to camera mode. The camera is a 5 megapixel beast with autofocus, image stabiliser and flash. The camera quality is very similar to that of the K850i. The autofocus uses face-detection software, so it will automatically focus on a face in a picture. The image stabiliser software we're less convinced about, but it may help to avoid camera blur in low lighting. The camera also has the BestPic™ feature which can automatically take nine photos in a second, so that you can then choose which one to keep. An Accelerometer feature senses which way up the phone is being held, and will automatically rotate your pictures into portrait or landscape mode. The main difference between the camera in the K850i and the C902 is that there is no Xenon flash in the C902. A Xenon flash is more powerful than a regular LED flash, however SE had a lot of problems with the Xenon flash on the K850i, so at least we can be confident that they have chosen a safe option for the new C902. The LED flash used for the C902 is more powerful than a standard one, and should give good results. Video recording is also comparable with the best of the K series phones, and video calling is available too, on a 3G network. A new "Storyteller" application lets you create presentations from pictures and show them on Facebook and other social networking sites.
Although its a Cyber-Shot phone, the C902 has great music capabilities too. The media player is fully featured, with support for album art. Sony's MegaBass™ ensures that you get rich sounds out of the small speaker. The PlayNow™ feature lets you personalise your phone by downloading an MP3 ringtone (you have to pay for downloads, however.) MP3 and AC ringtones are supported. TrackID™ can identify a song from a few seconds recording. An FM radio with RDS is also included. You can plug in a stereo headphone, or use an optional Bluetooth stereo headset. One thing that we really like is the large amount of built-in memory available - at 160 Mbytes this is big increase on what's available in the K850i, and makes it much easier to manage files. The phone supports Memory Stick Micro™ (M2™) cards up to 4 GB, which is enough to store 1,000 music tracks. For some reason though, there's no support for microSD cards.
Connectivity is very good, with support for Bluetooth and USB. The USB connection enables the phone to act as a USB mass storage device, so moving music and images between phone and PC is drag-and-drop simplicity itself. As already mentioned, this is a 3G phone, with HSDPA support enabling an "always-on" internet connection with download speeds of up to 3.6 Mbps - comparable with a home broadband connection. As well as being 3G, it's a quadband GSM phone, so should be usable anywhere in the world.
Battery life is adequate, but ultraslim phones tend to have shorter battery lives than conventional phones, which isn't surprising. The smaller screen size does help to reduce power consumption, and we don't think that the battery life will be an issue for most users.
We had hoped that the C902 would be free of bugs, but a number of users have reported problems with the phone freezing or crashing occasionally. It seems that Sony Ericsson still need to improve the reliability of their firmware. We hope that firmware updates will sort out these problems soon. Despite this, we really like the C902. Although it lacks a Xenon flash, we feel that its a much better all-rounder than the K850i, and is probably Sony Ericsson's best camera phone so far. It can probably match the Nokia N95 too, especially in good lighting conditions.
