Remember Sony Ericsson W880i? The same market niche now belongs to C902 with the only difference of the former's secondary focus feature being music while the latter is all about camera. W880i came to be an idol product among the musical (or at positioned to be such) phone, now it's time for C902 to try and take the same top chair in the photo segment. But even at that, you shouldn't expect really much from the camera, since it's only a secondary priority. It's just a powerful yet rather inexpensive 5 Mp unit without many additional features. It does take photos with an impressive resolution yet the overall quality is obviously yielding to the achievements of the pureblood cameraphones. The xenon flash commonly found in any Cyber-shot handset is missing from C902. On the other hand, you wouldn't expect such goodness from a strikingly slim (10 mm) phone sporting a metal casing and a grotesquely (yet quite pleasingly to the eye) shaped lens guard. Just a year ago a 5 Mp camera in a casing thinner than a centimeter was but a dream, now the dream comes true in the form of C902. By inventing this model, the company made a historical record, excelling the renowned slim device leading producer - Samsung. The Korean flagship is 2,5 millimeters thicker, though it utilizes the slider form factor.

Sony Ericsson C902 is after all a fashion handset, perfectly fitting this role. The design is extremely successful. The bigger part of the casing is manufactured from metal painted black or red, the plastic parts are the very peculiar lens guard, the bottom piece and the face panel. The material quality is very high, we couldn't find a way to reproach the assembly quality as well. Even in spite of the handset's use of sliding parts, the phone feels like a monolith once you take it in the hand, you neither feel bulkiness nor excessive frailty. The only small drawback could be the overly tough buttons of the keypad, which is the only sacrifice for the sake of minimal thickness.

A detailed review of Sony Ericsson C902 is already available on our site, now it's time to discuss the device's camera capabilities, which would be extremely interesting because the manufacturer employed a very unusual and successful solution when it came to designing camera controls.

Hardware implementation

The camera unit resides at the top of the casing. The shifting lens guard sports a very peculiar construction, working like an improvised sheath moving along the body. This reminds of Nokia 8600 Luna in a way, where the camera was protected by a sliding panel, also covering the numerical keypad. This way or another, SE engineers did their best at making this part damage-proof and reliable to the limit, the tight contact between the sheath and the rest of the phone makes it feel like an inalienable part of a monolith construction. It will never open because of an accidental shake. On top of other things, the construction has no protruding parts (which would inevitably increase the device's length) everything is touched by harmony and is really comfortable to operate. No part of ergonomics was sacrificed to the fancy design.

On shifting the sheath aside to reveal the camera, you will notice the thin strip of a neon-colored LED light. Just next to the camera you will see the small self-portrait mirror. The LED flash sits just near to the former two elements. Obviously it is no match to the xenon units commonly found in top-ranking pureblood cameraphones, but a phone as slim as this should be forgiven for employing this type of flash unit. The flash can remain in an active state during video shooting. The video quality is close to the results demonstrated by K850i, G900.

Talking in advance, let's note out that the photo quality is in a way comparable to that of K850i while C902 is rather miniature in comparison to the K850i flasghip. This places C902 among the best cameraphones ever manufactured by Sony Ericsson, also posing it as a very unique blend between camera power and fashionable looks. The G900 smartphone seems to fall under the same terms. The era of K850i is passing away, giving way to more versatile, miniature-sized models playing on several fields at once.

The rocker on the right edge of the casing serves to launch the camera application and also acts as the shoot button, the volume controls switch their role to zoom controls once the camera application is initialized. Unlike in K850i, there's no dedicated button switching between the gallery, video and photo modes, however this lack is generously compensated with a set of small touchpads surrounding the screen along the both sides, carrying the same functions.

The screen refresh rate is rather low in the viewfinder mode, as well as the focusing and image acquisition speed. The photos appear very clear-cut and sharp on the small-sized screen, the colors are very vivid and natural. The screen lacks a bit in the brightness department, the maximum level being below a picky customer's expectations. In brightly lit environments, you may discover an unpleasant lack of screen brightness. This can be explained by the manufacturer's intention to curb the energy consumption rate, which is vitally important for a slim phone with a weaker battery. Let's compare the brighntess and color depth of the screens used in Sony Ericsson C902 and Nokia 6220 Classic:

As you see, the screen of 6220 is much bleaker, the photos look quite unnatural, the accuracy and sharpness are obviously lover. The smartphone only wins in the size department, while the rest of features in C902 make it a preferred option.

Quick access panels

Let's start by pointing out the most interesting feature. It's not accidental that the physical dimensions of the screen are so unimpressive: just two inches. Two touch-responsive strips run along either side of the screen, which provide access to a variety of camera settings. On each side, four touch-sensitive spots are found. These icons are almost invisible while the camera is inactive, the backlight only turns on when you get down to shooting. A certain analogy with Motorola RAZR2 V8 comes to mind, in which the bottom of the screen features a touch-sensitive strip, however in our current case the icons aren't part of the screen but are rather small independent touchpads, not some virtual images. Of course this means that you can't customize the order and functionality of these icons. However, this would hardly ever become a necessety: the eight icons contain the settings absolutely necessary in normal everyday shooting.
The icons are:

• Photo
• Video
• Gallery
• Focusing mode
• Shooting mode
• Scenes
• Timer
• Flash

In order to switch between photo, video and gallery modes, you only have to tap on the corresponding icons - simple as that. Some of the menus contains a number of options, for example, four modes of focusing. The initial tap brings up a vertical help bar, each consequential tap serves to move the selection from one menu item to another. In different modes, certain menu items can appear greyed out, for example the focusing mode icon is inactive during video recording, and only three icons will stay active when you are browsing your photos in the gallery.

The images are highlighted with a bright blue color, are all clear-cut and the distance between is just enough to prevent any stray taps. In the shooting mode, the keypad backlight switches its regular white to a blue. In the overall score, SonyEricsson C902 has the most user friendly camera interface of today. This system is unique, combining a powerful fashion impulse with extremely usable controls. Sony Ericsson are further proving their status of the most innovation-friendly market player when it comes to controls and interface design, making a second lucky shot after the Touch Focus intrface utilized in G900. The latter, unfortunately, is missing from C902 since its screen has no touch capabilities.

Camera Interface and Settings

Let's now see in detail what the interface looks like. It utilizes the landscape orientation, the difference from K850i is minimal, for the concept proved to be very successful. The right part of the screen is occupied by three small icons which serve for switching between photo, video and gallery modes. The viewfinder window contains a lot of indicators: the current resolution, the flash status indicator, the macro mode status indicator, the number of shots which will fit into the remaining space on the memory card or the onboard storage, the image stabilization indicator, the geo-tagging activation status indicator.

Pressing the left navigation button conjures the trademark Cybershot-styled settings menu. The Standard, Landscape and Frame shooting modes are complemented by the original BestPic mode, an improvisation on the regular multishot feature common to most phones with a camera. Nine shots are taken (the interval between the shots is adjustable) once the camera gets focused on the desired object, the process can be interrupted at any moment by pressing the shot button.

Four focusing modes are available: auto, macro, infinity (effectively disabling the focusing) and face recognition. The latter mode is quite interesting: the object on which you locked your aim starts being followed by a small frame, turning from white (unfocused) to green or red. The feature works surprisingly efficiently though can be easily deceived with a photo. In the majority of cases, the actual benefit in quality is hardly recognizable, though at times the feature proves useful. In certain photos, we were able to spot a small boost in sharpness and accuracy.

A total of six scene presets are available in Sony Ericsson C902 + the Auto mode. That's not many, but is quite enough for everyday shooting. The list comprises:

• Auto
• Portait
• Landscape
• Twilight landscape
• Beach/snow
• Sports
• Document

Serial shooting knocks the maximum shot resolution down from 2592x1944 to 640x480. The number of shots in a series is selectable from 6, 9 or 15 with Normal or High quality.

Only four resolutions are available, it's queer that a lot of standard resolutions have been omitted:

• 2592x1944 (5M)
• 2048x1536 (3M)
• 1280x960(1.3M)
• 640x480 (0.3M)

The available special effects are rather scarce in number: Sepia, Negative, Solarize and Black and White. Also, the following extra features are available: timer, exposure meter, two photo quality presets (Fine, Normal), shutter sound (selectable from 4 variants or no sound at all), image stabilizer.

You can choose a frame out of a total of 18 available variants.

Image stabilization both for video and photo modes is also found in SE G900 and U900, though in either case the results are quite unimpressive. The real state of things is nowhere near to what the advertisments say. We weren't able to spot any perceivable difference between stabilized and unstabilized photos, so we only consider this feature a miscellaneous selling point without much real value.

A set of standard white balance (Auto / Daylight / Incandescent / Fluorescent / Cloudy) settings are available, though no ISO options are available, which looks to say the least a bit strange for a device with a focus on shooting. The misc settings include a geo tagging option. This feature is increasingly spreading outside the pureblood cameraphone sector. Image auto-rotation is supported, so it will always keep the original orientation of the camera at the moment of shooting, portrait or landscape.

Photo viewing

Photo and video viewing options are standard for all the latest multimedia phones sold by the company. Media is the standard viewer with an interface making you think of Sony PSP and a fully functional motion sensor which automatically switches screen orientation. The same unit is employed in K850i. Only left-side screen rotation is available, the feature can be turned off at will. Getting back to the media gallery, let's see how it functions. The following tabs are available: Photo, Music, Video, TV and Settings. All the titles are quite self-explaining. The interface itself sports bright and clear-cut graphics, transitions between menus are well animated, the performance of the galley application is rather high: no lags at all. The interface design doesn't depend on the positioning of the specific product, the same graphics layout is inherent to all the new UIQ models manufactured by the company.

The Photo menu item allows to view the last taken shot or the whole gallery, filter the images according to user-defined tags, or access the podcast menu. Inside the photo folder a number subfolders are found, organizing the content in a number of categories: the camera gallery (in which the photos are grouped by month), the latest taken photos, non-photo graphics and tagged photos. The monthly camera gallery shows thumbnails for each individual photo, a brief stats tab shows the total number and size of photos. Photo tags are quite new to the A200 platform. Just like with Nokia S60 FP2, the user is allowed to attach custom tags to his photos. This serves to be able to sort the images by their assigned tags later, so your urban life pictures won't ever get mixed with your Hawaii trip shots. Once a 'Hawaii' tag has been created, all photos associated with this tag will become available through a separate folder titled 'Hawaii'.

The X-Pict Story is in fact a slideshow composer program which only has a few basic settings. It won't let you set a custom time interval between the frames, and the transition effects as well as background music are hard-coded into the themes which are limited to four for the user to choose from. Once a 'mood' is selected, the background music and frame transition effect changes accordingly, these can't be customized in ways other than switching to another preinstalled theme. You can't add a user-made custom theme either.

Image editing

The PhotoDJ image editor and Photo Fix are expectedly included as part of the handset's imaging functionality. The former allows to post-process a photo right after it was acquired, also you can use it just to do some basic drawing like in MS Paint. It includes the following options:

• Rotate
• Auto Levels
• Brightness
• ISO balance
• Contrast
• Red Eye filter
• Apply effect (Negative, Cartoon, Frosted glass, Painting),
• Add object (Frame, Clipart, Text)

The Photo Fix function is a preinstalled set of filters which seek to improve the quality of your photos, efficiently doing away with minor flaws. Once it has been through the filter, you get a crisper and more vivid-looking photo.

Nokia 6220 classic

This model is an expected development of the mass market smartphone concept. It is all built on ideas radically different from what inspired the creators of Sony Ericsson C902. 6220 Classic is a maximally inexpensive handset, which is seen in almost every aspect. Assembly and material quality are rather poor, the design is unremarkable, almost faceless. Black and violet color versions are available. On the other hand, its camera is able of taking photos with a quality standing among the best on the market. The camera and flash units are just as powerful as in Nokia N82, the company's current camera flagship and the best cameraphone in TIPA's poinion. The company does their best to keep prices adequate, 6220 Classic starting from 320 euros, serving as a cheaper alternative to N82 and N78.

Nokia 6220 Classic will start selling from mid-June, the model is meant to remain a milestone product for the company over the course of 2008. A powerful advertising campaign is planned to draw the public attention towards the positive side of the product, pushing behind the curtains a number of quite obvious drawbacks like low material and assembly quality, offering a perfect size/functionality/price ratio, in which 6220 is seen as an upcoming leader. No other company can offer anything of the kind, 6220 coming equipped with a perfect camera module, a xenon flash sporting an unmatched quality, GPS availability and the latest revision of the operating system, Feature Pack 2.

The camera interface didn't change much since the time of Nokia N82, the pop-up quick settings bar is now customizable, the rest is all the same. Nokia 6620 is less comfortable in operation than C902, for instance due to a lack of touch-responsive control icons, but the overall impression is still strongly positive.

It's interesting to compare the possibilities offered by two products with very different positioning and pricing. Everybody makes he's choice how much the image aspect matters when about to pick a camera phone, and wether it's reasonable to sacrifice a bit of photo quality to get a better looking handset.

Comparison

All photos have been taken with maximum quality settings, the samples below clearly expose the difference. A few photos taken with Samsung U900 Soul will be added shortly for a comparison. U900 Soul comes from the same segment, being a slim fashion handset with a considerable imaging focus.

In the macro shooting mode, it is hard to define a clear leader, both devices are doing quite well. No color corruption is noticeable, the pictures are very crisp and detailed. In the landscape mode, Nokia 6220 seems to produce pictures of slightly better quality, proving its status as one of the world's leading smartphones on par with the N82 model. However this doesn't give any ground that the overall test results put 6220 above C902 - since the latter has much better camera controls and a lot of settings, also pertaining to a different market sector in which Nokia can't offer any counterparts. In practice, the difference in quality between the two cameras is hardly noticeable.

SMAPE's opinion

Sony Ericsson C902 produces an impression of a very close counterpart of Samsung U900 in terms of positioning and target audience. Both devices are equipped with cameras of an equally high quality, both have very ergonomical controls (the touch panels of C902 vs. the secondary screen with setting icons of U900 Soul) and a lot of other useful features. At the same time, none of these can be called a top cameraphone, for the actual quality of the taken photos is clearly inferior to that of Nokia 6220 classic, Nokia N82. Besides Samsung U900, the upcoming Motorola ZN5 could also make an adequate competitor to Sony Ericsson C902. The new device is a Kodak-branded slim cameraphone with a xenon flash. The three device will make the three core products forming the base of the whole market segment of fashion cameraphones, each of them still being unique in a sence.

On the other hand, slim fashion handsets with an accent on imaging are still a thing very different from regular cameraphones designed for the pure cause of photo creativity without specific fashion impact where functionality may be sacrificed in order to take advantage of a more compact and effective-looking build. C902 is mostly remarkable for the extremely high quality of assembly, materials, for the use of metal, very compact dimensions, fine design and probably the best organized shooting controls in the camera mode. The model stands out from the company's regular product line, opening a whole new division of hybrid fashion cameraphones.

The only drawback found in C902 is the price, which is expected to hit the 400 euros bar. We think it a bit overpriced, since the functionality isn't too high and the camera isn't a leader either. Though it should be understood that the product is designed to fit an audience who aren't looking for extreme possibilities. In this case, the camera is but a solid addition to the overall functionality and not an accented feature.

In the coming hours, we'll be publishing a detailed review of Sony Ericsson with a comparison sheet covering photo quality of C902 in a pit fight against Samsung U900 Soul. Stay tuned.

Author: Anton Spiridonov, editor@smape.com

SMAPE.com

	Comments: