Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot C905 eight-megapixel cameraphone

Indoors shooting is impressive too, with the xenon flash adding some welcome punch to illumination. It’s powerful, capable of working over a room-sized area and providing better-defined shots than an LED photo lamp. The result is possibly the best low-light shooting ability we’ve seen in a cameraphone.

Not exactly skinny

Images can be given a spruce up after shooting, using Photo Fix or PhotoDJ, while pics and videos can be uploaded straight to a Blogger account or another website. The Wi-Fi option is a big plus for this sort of thing, speeding uploads and potentially reducing costs too.

Video capture hasn’t had the same upgrade treatment as the photo facilities, and doesn’t match the Renoir or Pixon. Like the C902, it shoots at maximum 320 x 240 resolution at 30f/s, so produces average cameraphone quality, but it does look OK on the phone's screen.

The C905 arrives with a 2GB Memory Stick Micro card, so there’s sufficient room for large image files, music and other content even with the phone’s 160MB of internal storage. Usefully, a USB card reader is supplied too, providing another alternative for copying content.

Although this isn’t a Walkman-branded phone, the handset does have a decent quality music player on board. The user interface is as neat and tidy as the one on mid-tier Walkman phones, albeit with fewer listing categories. Unfortunately, the earphones are average mobile phone fare, and not a patch on the ones you get with up-range Walkman handsets.

Groan - another side-mounted multi-connector...

Sony Ericsson still hasn’t grasped that a standard 3.5mm headphone socket on the bodywork is best - the C905’s earphones plug straight into a standard Sony Ericsson multi-connector on the side. The typical Sony Ericsson plug positioning means its standard squat connector is awkward in the pocket and can get easily caught up - it would’ve been better on the top or bottom. There’s no 3.5mm headphone adaptor cable supplied with the headset either.