The big camera phone
Sony Ericsson dropped by our offices today with a bevy of HSDPA-enabled phones bound for the North American market. The crown jewel of the collection was the C905, a whopping 8.1-megapixel cameraphone with a wide range of camera features. The phone has face-detection auto focus, a Xenon flash and digital image stabilization, which isn't our favorite stabilization method for cameras, but we'll welcome any image enhancing features on a phone.
The phone is pretty thick, as you might expect from a shooter of such gravitas. It's also a slider, which Sony Ericsson reps note is a first for the Cyber-Shot family. Instead of hiding the lens under the slide, however, the lens is covered by a slick mechanism around back that slider down and out of the way. It's a very sleek setup, and the device is easily recognizable as a camera when you're holding it to take pics. We liked the dedicated camera buttons on the phone, but of course the proof is in the pictures, so we'll have to give this one a thorough test before we toss our compact point-and-shoots.
We especially liked the phone's interface. Sony Ericsson's proprietary UI is bright and clean, with wonderfully designed icons on a crisp, colorful screen. We enjoyed a similar interface on the Sony Ericsson Z750 on AT&T, and the screens we saw on the C905 looked even better. The phone also gets GPS, which is a rarity for S/E phones.
The slim multimedia flip phone
Sony Ericsson also showed us their update to the Z750, the Z780 (check out our hands-on gallery). Like the C905, the Z780 will run on AT&T's 3G HSDPA network, though no official carrier support has been announced. The phone is a rather dull looking flip, though we liked the purple shell, and the interface is the same Sony Ericsson UI we rave about. Otherwise, the phone will also feature Exchange ActiveSync support, which is an interesting find on a mid-range multimedia phone, as well as Google Maps, which will work with the phone's A-GPS.
The design won't win any awards, so hopefully Sony Ericsson will deliver on features and keep the price low. The phone's front is dominate by a large, bulging camera, which gives it a cyclops look, but in an ancient Greek Odysseus way, not a cool X-Men way. The flip isn't designed to be sharp like the Motorola RAZR, but rather keeps things more simple. Oh well, did we mention the nice interface design?
And a few for the road
Besides those two, which we hadn't seen in person before today, Sony Ericsson also broke out a few other models. They showed us a W760 Walkman phone in a very pretty shade of black, and we think this phone could be a winner. Reps claim that the phone's predecessor, the Sony Ericsson W580, is one of the best selling phones in AT&T's lineup, and we thought that was a good phone, so the W760, now with 3G HSDPA support, should be even better.
They also brought by the Sony Ericsson W350 slim Walkman phone, which has a very cool flip design and a thin body. It's a slick looking phone, and the fact that it showed up in our conference room today gives us hope that we'll see it on these shores. The Sony Ericsson C702 splash-proof camera phone was also on hand, with it's 3.2-megapixel sensor.
What's it all about?
Sony Ericsson will have a much bigger presence on AT&T this year, if things go well. The company didn't make any specific carrier announcements, but they did make clear that all of the 3G phones we saw today were tri-band HSDPA with support for AT&T's fast network, so it's all up to the carrier at this point. We've had some good experiences with Sony Ericsson phones, both on AT&T and unlocked, so we're always hoping to see more phones from the company make their way into U.S. stores, and especially so the Sony Ericsson C905.
Sony Ericsson's U.S lineup:
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