Sony Ericsson C702 review: Allroad Cyber-shot

Telephony

While Sony Ericsson C702 offers good reception, call clarity was an issue with our test unit. Sound in the earpiece is somewhat muffled, a probable consequence of the materials used to reinforce the vulnerable parts of the splash and dust resistant phone. Since we do not have a simiar Sony Ericsson handset as a reference point we're not sure how that might be handled in the retail version.

Calling Dexter

The C702 ranks among the loudest Sony Ericson phones we've tested so far with only the T650 outperforming it by a whisker. Here is how the handset ranks among some of the other handsets we've measured in our speakerphone loudness test. You can find more information about the test itself here.

User interface spiced up

The user interface in C702 has the well known Sony Ericsson feature phone styling, spiced up with a few recently introduced features, we've discussed in previous reviews.

The main features in the C702 user interface include the optimized Media Center, Flash Lite 2.0 support, 4 types of main menu views, and the three-soft-key layout. Unfortunately, the auto rotate capability seen in K850 and C902 is missing here.

As most previous models, the C702 comes with a dedicated Flight mode. When turning on the phone, you may opt to start it directly into Flight mode. The Sony Ericsson C702 cannot work in Flight mode unless a SIM card is inserted, unlike competing Nokia S40 models.

In active stand-by mode the screen displays information about the network signal, battery strength, current date and time, plus the next alarm due. Pressing the navigation key in any of the four directions can start a user-programmed feature or application. The main menu itself is a 4 x 3 grid of animated icons, each of which can be directly accessed by pressing its corresponding alphanumeric key. All sub-menus are in list view with tiny icons on the left side. Response is fast in every submenu and application. Nothing new in the standard stand-by and default menu so far.

Standby view • the main menu • a listed sub menu

The first thing to mention is the changes in the main menu structure we already saw in Sony Ericsson C902. The menu can now be diversified with a couple of alternative views: rotating, single icon and From Theme.

Setting up the main menu layout

The rotating view shows three animated front icons on the display, the center one showing the active selection. The other two icons are half-hidden, just as an indication of what comes next. Five other menu icons can be seen in the dim background.

Rotating view layout

The icon view displays a single icon at a time and a vertical bar with position mapping. Neither of those views works with shortcut keys. The Grid view only allows quick numeric keypad access - a good enough reason to forget about the other options once you've tried them.

Icon view layout

In our Sony Ericsson C702 there is only one theme preinstalled, but be sure that more will be added before the phone hits the market officially.

The well-known Activity menu has a dedicated shortcut key on the keypad. The Now running tab of the menu offers multi-tasking - for example you can run two Java applications and listen to the radio or to the music player simultaneously. The Activity menu also offers quick access to recent events, the web menu and the My Shortcuts menu, which contains a list of frequently used features and can be modified to the user preference.

The four tabs of the Activity menu