Sony Ericsson C903 review

After Sony Ericsson's recent announcement that it plans to phase out the distinction between its Cyber-Shot and Walkman brands, the C903 may be one of the last Cyber-Shot cameraphones we see.

And on this evidence, we'll be a little sorry to see it go. The C903 is a beautifully compact little slider at 97x49x16 mm and 96g with a nicely robust sliding action. The 262k-colour 2.4-inch LCD display only has a standard VGA resolution of 240x320 pixels but still manages to look beautifully sharp and clear, and even proved to be legible in bright sunlight.

Beneath the screen you'll find a square D-pad and six neatly arranged buttons for call start and stop, shortcuts, cancel and two soft keys – all nice and easy to get your thumb around.

Around the sides are a camera shutter button, a rocker that allows you to toggle between camera and video as well as your gallery, volume rocker and Fast Port power/headphone jack. There's also a Memory Stick Micro card slot hidden under the casing (you can hot swap it though) and a casing lock switch on the bottom.

Being Cyber-Shot phone, the C903's camera is the star and it's up and running in about three seconds after sliding the lens cover down. The cover runs the entire length of the phone and feels a little thin and cheap – you get the feeling that if it caught on something it could easily pop off.

The 5-megapixel camera has most of the best features of the Cyber-shot range – autofocus, image stabiliser, face detection, BestPic, Smile Shutter (which takes a snap automatically when it detects a smile) and Panorama. There's no Smart Contrast though, and it has an LED flash, not the Xenon variety you'll find on the 8-megapixel C905, though with twin bulbs it's impressively bright for an LED.

The D-pad operates shortcuts when in camera mode so you can quickly get to your focus, flash, exposure and timer settings and there's also geotagging thanks to the onboard A-GPS, supported by Google Maps. There's a powerful 16x digital zoom too, though the quality deterioration at that level is shocking enough to dissuade you from using it too much.

The C903 can deliver pictures at up to 2592x1944 pixels and they're generally pretty good ones too, with reasonably accurate colours and nicely sharp edges. It records video in QVGA resolution at 30fps, which isn't bad at all, and the flash can be used as a video light. Quality was good here too, with little in the way of blur and not too much distracting noise. It supports video calling incidentally, although there's no front-facing camera, so you'll need to turn it around and talk to the lens, not your caller.

We said at the top of the review that Sony Ericsson hadn't skimped much on the feature set, but there's at least one serious omission – Wi-Fi. Without it browsing is often going to be a frustrating experience, though the HSDPA connection does an okay job for viewing web pages, but down and uploads take longer than we've been getting used to of late.

The Access NetFront browser itself is usable, with the onboard accelerometer automatically flipping the screen into landscape mode when you turn it on its side and the number keys acting as shortcuts for zoom, Google search and bookmarks. There's a YouTube app on board, but without Wi-Fi, streaming video with it can be hit and miss.

The media player does a good job of rendering video and there's a handy zoom function that allows you to blow widescreen movie trailers up to full screen size. It means clipping off the edges, but it generally looks better than having black bars top and bottom on a smallish screen like this. There's also a TV out option to allow you to display your pics and vids on your telly, though you'll need to get a cable for it unless your TV has a USB slot.

The music player is a good one too, with five basic equaliser settings plus a five-band graphic equaliser that you can set manually, but the headphones are of SE's cheaper type, well below the quality of its Walkman range, and there's no 3.5mm adapter for the fast port power/headphones plug.

It's nice to see an FM radio with 20 presets included though, especially with SE's very handy TrackID service, which allows you to identify mystery tunes.

The C903 comes with Sony Ericsson's Media Go syncing software, first seen on the W995, which offers an easy way to sync your videos, pics and music with your computer, and provides a link to Sony Ericssson's online store. It looks better and is more intuitive than the old PC Suite, but it ain't no iTunes.

There's 130MB of memory on board but you can increase that to 16GB via Memory Stick Micro card, though there's none supplied.

Extras include four games, plus some photo manipulation apps and Walk Mate, a basic step counter that uses the accelerometer to keep track of how far you've been walking every day. There's also a three-month trial of Wayfinder Navigator sat nav software.

The Tracker sports training app is also on board, which uses GPS to track your route and speed and analyse the results. It's basic stuff, and with no altimeter it doesn't take hills into account and doesn't do any fancy stuff like calculating calories burned.

Battery life is quoted as up to ten hours talk time and 400 hours of standby and in practise we found that it barely gave us two full days of moderate use, which is less than we were expecting.

The Sony Ericsson C903 is another strong addition to the Cyber-shot range, with a more than decent 5 megapixel camera that includes all the best shooting features you'll find on the more expensive C905, a good music player, A-GPS and a heap of extra goodies. The only real drawback is the lack of Wi-Fi.