Digital Trends

Sony Ericsson C902 November 25th, 2008 | by Stewart Wolpin

Sound Quality

Voice quality on T-Mobile's New York City network was clean and consistent, if a little on the thick and muffled side.
The C902's rear speaker pumps out impressive volume for both music and voice, with no sign of distortion at the upper end that usually plagues these cheap speakers.

As an added plus, the speaker doesn't care if it's face up, or face down. We’re not sure how Sony Ericsson did it, but we detected no volume difference worth mentioning, and little aural difference regardless, of whether the speaker was facing up or down. In fact, the C902's speaker sounded a little fuller when facing down.

As a result of the excellent speaker, ring tones sound blisteringly loud at their highest settings. You can also use one of your own tracks as a ring tone, too, so the louder the track you pick, the louder the ring tone.

Phone Functionality

As noted, the biggest problem with the C902 is its tightly-packed dial pad keys. Anyone with less than dainty fingers will have problems punching digits with any degree of consistent accuracy. Plus, with such small keys, numbers and especially alpha characters, are not easy to read, especially for farsighted users, even with the white backlighting. By increasing the on-screen font size to "large," it's easy to double-check your number pressing.

These tiny keys with their tiny characters may not present huge problems for "dialing" phone numbers, but text input becomes a challenge for those with chubbier fingers and less than perfect vision.
At 4.3 inches long, the phone comfortably stretches from ear to your mouth's corner, so you'll feel as if you're taking into the phone.

You'll want to change the C902's default white-on-black display theme, since menus and lists are far easier to discern in one of the dark-on-light themes.

Sony Ericsson delineates the new contact entry form into five components: name and number on one screen, then tabs for email and Web address, one for personalization – picture, ring tone, message alert, voice command, snail mail info for home and office, and personal information such as birthday. This actually makes data entry much easier since you're not continually scrolling down a long page. 

Web and E-Mail

We had plenty of problems provisioning the phone for varying data duties such as Web access and email, an inherent problem with DIY unlocked phones. In the end, we were able to load Web and email settings into the phone using T-Mobile's handy provisioning page – settings are transmitted to the phone via text.

Even though the C902 is HSDPA capable, and even though T-Mobile has a 3G network in New York City, we could only pick up EDGE service on our test C902. As such, pages loaded in around 12-15 seconds, which is actually pretty quick considering all the graphics on most of the HTML sites we visited.

Oddly, the C902 refused to display CNN.com, or any mobile variation therein. We had no trouble with any other site.
The C902 is equipped with an HTML browser that, while good-looking, is awkward to navigate without a touch screen or the usual numbered WAP link lists. You get an arrow to indicate position, and finger-pointing cursor to indicate clickable links, then move around a page using the directional pad, which slows surfing considerably.

While text wraps to the screen, the font on most pages ranges from miniscule to unreadable. You can zoom text in 10 percent increments up to 200 percent, and your zoom setting holds as you surf from one page to another and from one site to another. While the accelerometer auto-rotates the page view to landscape, the text size and text wrap don't change, but you will see more of whatever graphics that are on the page.

Email is far better executed. While the C902 lacks pre-configured account settings, we were able to set up Gmail and AOL accounts using only usernames and email address. We assume most of the common email domains are just as easy to set up, even though they’re not listed.

The phone also can automatically check for mail from every 24 hours to every 5 minutes, or you can turn on "push" email. You can also assign different settings to different accounts. 

Battery Life

In our tests – just letting the music play until the battery died – we got 19.5 hours of continuous music play, about 50 percent more than most music-enabled phones not made by Apple.

We also got 7.5 hours of talk time, but that's on T-Mobile's EDGE network, and is actually about an hour and a half less than the rated nine-hour EDGE talk time. Sony Ericsson says you'll get around four hours of talk time on a 3G network. If its 3G performance parallels our EDGE talk-time results, figure more like 3.5 hours.

Conclusion

Because the C902 is unlocked, its price is a firm $549.99 – no carrier subsidy. For some, this steep tag will be a deal breaker, especially considering other phones with as much to recommend them (i.e. the Motorola ZINE ZN5, $99 from T-Mobile) are substantially cheaper, if you commit to a multi-year service contract. Judged without the price consideration, the C902 is probably best suited to DIY types with small fingers who need/want a little of everything a modern cell phone offers, but don't want to be saddled with a long-term service contract. Its camera is nearly the best available, but all its other high-tech functions are plagued by enough annoying little drawbacks to make it hard to justify its price.

Pros:

• Unlocked 3G/HSDPA
• High-quality Cyber-shot 5-megapixel camera with Xenon flash
• Excellent music player
• Easy to set up email accounts
• HTML Web browser
• Accelerometer

Cons:

• Expensive
• Small, tightly-packed dial pad keys
• No 3.5mm headphone jack
• Uses hard-to-find M2 Memory Sticks