I’ve been using my Nokia N95 for about 1.5 years now, and while there is much that I like about it, the camera is just not quite up to snuff. The camera is one of the features I use most in a mobile phone and so I’d decided that now my contract is up, I’d go far a serious camera phone at the cost of perhaps losing some of the smartphone features I’ve come to know and love.

The Sony Ericsson C905 fits the bill. With a brilliant Cybershot 8.1MP camera, it is almost as good quality as the ultracompact Cybershot that I own. The camera is good in low light but does have a propensity for red eye, I’ve found.

As for the rest of the phone, it’s been a bit of a let down. It’s not really a smartphone but more of a feature phone, and it shows. The screen is not huge and the RSS feeds I’ve set up on it take a huge amount of screen real estate. Furthermore, the processing power of the device is not great. J2ME apps take significantly longer to install and load on this device than my old N95. The menuing system is slightly convoluted, moreso than Symbian, with some features being nested deep within a huge number of clicks. And the phone book lookup and predictive text is not nearly as clever as Symbian’s implementation.

In light of all this I’m slightly regretting having picked up this phone, but every time I need to use the camera (i.e. often) it feels somewhat redeemed.

I can’t express enough how underwhelmed I am by the recent announcement of the iPhone 3G. I honestly thought the second generation iPhone might be appealing enough for me to make it my regular phone, but with such glaring feature omissions I will be saving it for times of desperation.

For me what really kills it are the following:

• Poor camera and no video. 2 megapixels just doesn’t cut it. With 8MP camera phones that are video-capable launching in Europe this summer it’s hard not to fault this.
• Lack of Bluetooth support. Yes, the iPhone 3G supports Bluetooth, but only for certain devices and it lacks stereo Bluetooth and support for many hands-free in-car systems. Not to mention that the device doesn’t support Bluetooth file transfers. Ouch.
• Still no support for multitasking. Argh.. Jobs claims this is to preserve battery life, but what a frustration. I often have many apps open at a time on my Nokia devices and find it hard to imagine that I could function otherwise.

Hopefully the next iPhone will hold more promise. Power smartphone users demand better than this.

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Written on May 7th, 2008 , Gadgets, Mobile