Sony Ericsson C905 review: Cyber shot, cyber hot

Flashy Media Center

Sony Ericsson are obviously trying to place more and more content and options in the media center. We appreciate their effort as we simply love the media interface.

Sony Ericsson C905 is equipped with Music Player 3.0, which is almost the same as the Walkman player 3.0 seen in Sony Ericsson W980. The player supports numerous file formats, including MP3, AAC, AAC+, E-AAC +, WAV, WMA, M4A and MIDI plus the MegaBass equalizer preset and Stereo widening.

The player can naturally be set to run in the background. Sound is rich and crisp - as long you're using the player with a good headset, that is. If you are not willing to use the media player step-by-step structure, you can directly play a track through the file manager with its classic flat tree structure.

The player with mega bass preset

The video player accommodated in the media center supports fast-forwarding and rewinding, while the interface is simple and stylish. The built-in accelerometer allows the video player to auto rotate. Again, the video files are accessible via the file manager but there you cannot opt to auto rotate the file, which we found a bit odd. Landscape mode can be set from the menu though. Fullscreen player mode and screenshot capability, are some cool extras in the player. You can save a frame of video and add it to the gallery.

Video player in Media center

Using the video player in landscape mode is much more comfortable

The Media center menu lists the Photo, Music, Video, RSS feeds and Settings icons. Along with the traditional functionality we've discussed in detail in several Sony Ericsson reviews, there is one extra icon for Games. The settings menu is simple - you may opt for portrait, landscape or auto rotate screen orientation, thanks to the integrated accelerometer sensor.

Media center step-by-step structure

The first section in the Media Center is the Photo gallery. It consists of: Latest Photo, Camera Album, Photo Tags, Photo Feeds, and Pictures. Latest Photo provides quick access to most recent photos. Camera Album is a thumb list for each month of the year. When a month is open, it reveals a 4x3 grid of thumbs of photos. Scrolling down shows all the photos taken in the corresponding month. The highlighted photo is a bit larger for better viewing.

The Pictures section opens again as a 4x3 grid of thumbs with non-camera images, such as the preinstalled wallpapers. When exiting the full screen view of a picture, it smoothly zooms out to thumb view.

Photo viewer in Media center

Generally, the Photo gallery is a powerful tool for conveniently managing a vast collection of camera photos with great customization capabilities. Photo Tags is a feature for displaying previously marked favorite photos. The Up key on the D-pad offers quick access to sending options like: send as Picture Msg, as email, to blog, via Bluetooth. Other than that, you can set a photo as wallpaper, screen saver, startup screen, and contact picture straight from the gallery. The well known Pan and Zoom and slideshow feature are also on board.

Viewing a photo • favorites dubbed photo tags • quick send • options menu

Accordingly, picture browsing via the classic file manager is still possible, but kind of pushed aside with the timeline view missing. This is quite a pity, in mind that T650 and K810 have it.

Picture browsing in the file manager

PhotoDJ, videoDJ and musicDJ are also quite common features for all the Sony Ericsson phones, which are available here too.

You can zoom in to the actual size of the picture or even beyond, yet extreme zooming in won't really reveal more detail. As usual with Cyber-shot phones, browsing full-res images didn't involve any lags at all.

Zooming in on a photo

FM radio with RDS and TrackID

The integrated FM radio of Sony Ericsson C905 has memory for 20 stations and supports RDS. It has nice interface and makes great use of the TrackID music recognition service. The radio can be minimized in the background much like the music player but offers none of the fancy fullscreen graphics.

FM radio interface

TrackID is accessible through its original location in the entertainment menu. The service itself has seen several changes to include features like "Find similar Music", "Send music info via SMS", "TrackID charts" and a very extensive "Artist info" section.

The TrackID service has seen several updates