Sony Ericsson C905 - Celebrating in Eights

Features & Performance

Beyond Imagery

Now, you might be wondering how the C905 handles itself in the power efficiency department. Powered by its 930mAh battery, we subjected the C905 to two different battery tests. Firstly, we worked on the basis that the C905 will be heavily utilized as a dedicated imaging device. On hindsight, you probably won't be using most of its power draining, wireless features such as Wi-Fi, HSDPA or Bluetooth, so we'll be checking on its battery stamina just based on its camera features. Leaving our settings on Auto since it's the most often used one, the C905 was able to take up to almost 200 images before it shut itself down.

Now, if one were to treat it as any other mobile phone, we'll be looking at a few specific areas: average usage of its camera features on top of the wireless connection options and cellular functions. For this, we activated the previously dormant Wi-Fi and Bluetooth as an additional power drain. In just slightly more than a day, we had to reconnect the C905 to the charger. If you're wondering, we took around 50 images for both day and night shots (Xenon flash utilized here) and had a few quick conversations on the phone as part of the test. The results weren't surprising for its 930mAh battery, especially so when you couple its usage with a myriad of features that have high power consumption.

As one would expect from the Sony Ericsson name, we weren't disappointed with its audio delivery. Though we didn't receive the top-notch audio fidelity as heard on its Walkman cousin, the Sony Ericsson W980, it did manage to deliver adequate pleasure to our ear canals. Lows were pumped with just the right amount of power, as were the mids when we managed to catch the clarity of vocal tracks. Its highs, however, came in a little flat as we had to stretch our senses to detect the cymbals and higher notes on the guitar playback. A few pages back, we did mention that Sony Ericsson is still sticking with the proprietary route. Fortunately, you are still able to use your preferred earphones since the audio connector has a 3.5mm audio jack. In our opinion, the bundled inner earphones will suffice to do the job when we compared that to some in-house earphones that we've been using for our testing purposes.

Visually, there are a few things to consider. The first factor we're looking at is its display, which measures in at 2.4-inches with a 240 x 320 resolution at 256K colors. This probably won't give you astounding images, but it is a fair trade-off for power efficiency. As such, video playback was adequate, though we did notice some frame losses for faster scene playback.

Wireless connectivity is aplenty on the C905. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are kind of the de facto connections available on high tier devices nowadays. GPS (and its A-GPS capability) however, are not often seen on most Sony Ericsson devices till recently. The C905 comes with both Google Maps and WayFinder to complement your GPS navigation. In short, we tested the satellite locking speed, and it was pretty fast at less than a minute. This bodes well for imaging purposes too, as the C905 also comes with geo-tagging that allows you to record your GPS location into the EXIF data for any images captured with the 8-megapixel camera.