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Sony Ericsson flaunts the location of the camera key and the lens cover as designed for one-handed use. A bit of a case of over hype, that one, as many handsets have a lens cover that flips down to activate the camera and a side mounted shoot button. They work one handed, and I can't deny that this phone does too, but it is hardly a new feature.

Sony Ericsson also pushes the phone's ‘steady grip' materials. As far as I can see this amounts to an indented pattern on the rubberised battery cover. Yes it is easier to hold the phone steady one-handed than with a smoother surface, but it is hardly ground breaking stuff.

The C702 offers 3.2-megapixels rather than the 5.0 of the C902. And its general set of features is a bit reduced on that other handset too. There is no BestPic (where the camera shoots multiple images and you can keep the best), and no image stabilisation. Still, you do get face detection for automatically ensuring the camera focuses on any people in your shot rather than what is around them, and picture blogging from the handset.

The LED flash is double-barrelled which gives the camera a bit more oomph than usual for indoor shooting. You can also use it as a torch, setting it to stay on permanently or for a minute, or in flashing SOS mode.

The coloured dish photographed under normal household lights and without the flash is reasonably well defined and its colours are vibrant enough. Outdoors the chair photo is a bit less pleasing. Its white is not uniform and its detail not quite as good as I'd like. The tomatoes were photographed using macro mode, and this works well, though at a distance of a few centimetres from the subject the lens has obvious difficulty with the closest elements of the image.

Of course, this phone also plays music. Unfortunately I was not able to test its battery life in this respect, but Sony Ericsson suggests 7 hours GSM talk which is two hours less than the C902, so you should expect proportionately less than the C902's 15 and a half hours of non-stop music.

Other features not mentioned include a Web browser, RSS feed reader, FM radio, TrackID, VideoDJ, PhotoDJ, MusicDJ, Bluetooth remote control, sound recorder, mobile email, five alarms, calendar, task manger, notes taker, timer, stopwatch, and calculator.

Verdict

Sony Ericsson's C702 Cyber-shot is a reasonable choice if you can't afford the company's C902, but there is a lot of competition at this level and the C702 doesn't really stand out despite its water and dust resistance.

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