Sony Ericsson were first to make headlines at this year's Mobile World Congress, and continue to keep us busy previewing a bunch of debuting devices. Our series of quick hands-on sessions ends with a cameraphone. Sony Ericsson C902 is the new Cyber-shot squad member. The C902 designation does break a mold, as all previous Cyber-shot models belonged to the K-series. It's now C for Cyber-shot, nice and easy.

At a first glance, C902 looks like a direct descendant of the Sony Ericson K850, but it will be another handset to inherit the latter.

Sony Ericsson C902 has a surprisingly small 2" 262K-color TFT display of QVGA resolution. When the display is off, it does look like at least a 2.2 incher, but with the lights on the reason for this size is obvious - there are eight touch sensitive camera keys that backlight in blue around the display. More about them is to come later on.

As a camera-centric phone, Sony Ericsson C902 bundles up a 5 megapixel autofocus shooter offering a good range of niceties. Among them are face detection, image and video stabilizer, BestPic, auto-rotate, macro mode, photoflash LED, etc.

The camera itself is rather discrete, slumbering under a trademark sliding top. Once you slide it up, the camera is revealed and you are ready to shoot. The flimsy sliding mechanism (no spring assist or anything) in our beta version of the phone will certainly see improvements before the final version hits the shelves.

The multimedia package includes Media player with the Mega Bass equalizer preset, TV out, FM radio with RDS, TrackID. A 3D Need for Speed game is on top of the regular stuff in the entertainment sector. Bluetooth with A2DP makes sure music can be enjoyed on a wireless stereo headset.

The C902 is a global phone with quad-band GSM /EDGE support. The European version of the phone will also feature HSDPA (3.6 Mbps) for fast data transfers. The versions for America (Sony Ericsson C902a) and China Mainland (Sony Ericsson C902c) lack HSDPA support.

Sony Ericsson C902 has 160MB of internal memory and will feature a M2 memory card slot. C902 is quite compact, at only 10.5 mm thick, yet its full metal body adds to the total weight of 107 g.

Sony Ericsson C902 will be available from Q2 2008 in Swift Black and Luscious Red.

Sony Ericsson C902 looks a normal bar, but the form factor is not quite set in stone. The handset is complete with the novel slide-up lens cover we mentioned earlier. The phone is a solid piece.

With a full metal casing, the C902 feels quite pleasant in hand, the commendable 10.5 mm slimness going well with the hefty 107 g of weight. Glossy surfaces dominate the front, the rear is all matt.

The 2" diagonal of the display is nothing impressive, but the eight touch sensitive camera keys around it are worth the fuss. In camera mode they are responsible for switching between video and still camera, accessing the photo gallery, changing the autofocus mode, shoot mode, scenes, timer and flash mode.

Having selected a setting, its icon blinks briefly in the center of the viewfinder before it smoothly drops down to take its place in the viewfinder status bar.

The small display deserves very high marks on both color rendering and sunlight legibility, even if it's not a transreflective unit as the ones of G700 and G900.

The C902 keypad is barely decent. The alphanumeric keyboard is crammed down on the front panel and the rows of buttons are quite tightly packed. The the keys have decent width and good feedback but what really stands in the way of comfortable typing though is the awkward reverse terracing.

The D-pad and controls around the keyboard are OK. Under the pair of soft keys the dedicated Call and End key are placed, comfortably raising above their surroundings.

The keyboard backlighting however is a true disaster but with beta units we can't be too demanding. The white backlighting turns blue (the alphanumeric keypad is shut off) when the lens cover is slid up or the camera is on.

The sides of the handset are distinguished for the black-gray stripe pattern. The top and bottom hold no controls. The universal port is on the left, while the right side sports the camera key and the volume rocker, The latter is rather awkwardly placed near the bottom below the shutter key.

At the back, the 5 megapixel autofocus camera lies secretly beneath its sliding cover. The opening of the camera cover activates the camera no matter what menu or submenu you are at. It doesn't work only when you have opened some application such as the Calendar or Phonebook.

Opening the camera by the flashing of the lights a blue LED band on the back of the handset. 

Other than that, the newly developed photoflash LED is also worth due attention.

The photoflash LED makes a compact and more efficient substitute for the xenon flash used in small digicams and cameraphones. The new photoflash LED is stated to produce approximately 25 lux/s. Its smaller size and twice less power consumption than standard xenon flash make it especially suitable for portable devices. It also doesn't need to recharge the way the xenon flash needs to after it has discharged when it fires.

Our hands-on experience with it convinced us that it's more powerful than the regular LED flashes, however at least in our test unit it's nowhere near the xenon flash performance.

Removing the rear panel of the phone reveals the standard Sony Ericsson BST-38 Li-Po battery with a capacity of 930 mAh. It's rated at up to 400 h of standby time and up to 9 h of talk time. Above the battery compartment are the SIM and the M2 card slots. It's a pity the memory card slot is only accessible after removing the battery cover.

We are pleased with the size, form factor and usability of the Sony Ericsson C902.

The user interface in C902 has the well known Sony Ericsson feature phone styling, spiced up with a few new features. Typical hi-end cameraphone, C902 puts up front the rich photography and multimedia capabilities. When it comes to multimedia, the new Cyber-shot products are catching up quickly with the Walkman lineup.

The first thing to mention though is the changes to the main menu structure. Except the traditional 4 x 3 grid matrix, the main menu can now be diversified with a couple of alternative views: rotating and single icon view.

But all those are tidbits, compared to the camera where the real power of the C902 lies. The 5 megapixel autofocus shooter offers a good range of niceties as face detection, image and video stabilizer, BestPic, auto-rotate, macro mode, photoflash LED, etc.

There are eight touch sensitive camera keys that backlight in blue around the display. They are active only in camera mode and are responsible for switching between video and still camera, accessing the photo gallery, changing the autofocus mode, shoot mode, scenes, timer and flash mode. Having selected a setting, its icon blinks briefly in the center of the viewfinder before it smoothly drops down to take its place in the viewfinder status bar.

The SE Cyber-shot v2.0 camera user interface is implemented. Its pop-up sub-menus enhanced with icons and the Multi Menu packing all the available settings known since K850 are here to facilitate the user experience.

The camera toolbar gives access to shoot mode, scenes, picture size, focus, flash, self-timer, metering mode, white balance, effects, and settings Multi Menu. Sadly, an ISO setting is not available in C902, at least with our beta unit.

The focus mode however has an extra feature - the Face detection we've seen on point-and-shoot cameras. The face recognition system allows you to toggle among the available faces on group photos, but cannot track more that one face at a time.

The image stabilizer is supposed to keep images from blurring in dark environments but, as in all phone cameras, so far it's purely a software tweak of questionable efficiency.

The ultra quick-snapping BestPic mode has two varieties - fast and slow. In fast mode it produces 9 full-size 5 megapixel images for about a 1.3sec, each of them of approximately 1MB of size. Saving all the images on the memory card afterwards takes about 15 seconds. The slow mode takes 9 images again but with larger interval of a total of 2.5sec.

The newly introduced photoflash LED is capable of illuminating all the images taken in BestPic with equal flash output but only when you use the fast BestPic mode.

Despite official claims that the new Photoflash LED is able to provide 3 times more power that the regular LED, we were unable to verify this statement. Nevertheless, the photos came out well and it might be a good trade-off - substituting the xenon flash for a photoflash LED that works in BestPic mode.

The dedicated macro mode in C902 allows you to take images from as close as 8 cm, just like with the K850 camera. The silent shooting mode completes the worth-mentioning features of the C902 camera.

Thanks to the built-in accelerometer the camera is also able to auto-rotate your images when you are previewing them.

Judging the camera quality of a beta unit is a risky business. Even so, it's clear the C902 camera is a capable shooter. The images are crisp with nice detail. Noise level is relatively low, especially with sufficient light. The autofocus camera does very well at close-ups. Color rendering is relatively good; yet all colors are a bit cold. We think they need some 10-15% more saturation to ride high.

Unfortunately, the trademark red-to-pink conversion that al

l recent Sony Ericsson cameraphones manifest is still present here and judging from our experience it will be there in the final products too.

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.

Sony Ericsson are obviously trying to place more and more content and options in the media center with its original interface and we appreciate their effort as we simply love this flash-based interface.

The game section houses one accelerometer based game - Need for Speed Pro Street. It has a cool 3D interface and is entertaining enough to be worth a few hours of reviewing time. Oh, and another interesting fact before we spin to another track, here your NFS car can be steered with both the D-pad and the built-in accelerometer function (we can't wait to get that racing on the iPhone).

The other new feature spotted in the settings menu is the TV-Out, which allows you to set the TV-out function to work in either PAL or NTSC mode - not really of importance if you have a multi-system TV set. We wonder if the TV-out cable will be included in the C902 retail package - that would be cool.

Anyways, one last thing about the Media center - you can also set its screen to auto rotate to portrait or landscape mode. We wish we had that option throughout the user interface.

Ok, enough talking, rev up and let's burn some rubber on the track.

The Sony Ericsson C902 is a very promising cameraphone with some extra features and camera improvements. The stylish slim body, the original slide-up camera design and excellent build quality gain the C920 good points among style-conscious users.

As the Sony Ericsson C902 is expected at about 330-350 EUR, you might as well keep your K850 just for now.