The Sony Ericsson C905a has a good 8.1-megapixel camera, 3G / HSDPA speeds, quad-band support, a music player that supports audiobooks and podcasts, and it has good call quality, too. However, the Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot C905a does not have a 3.5-millimeter headset jack. If you need a fine quality camera telephone from ATT, you can’t get it wrong with the Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot C905a.

In fact, from the back, the telephone appears more like a point-and-shoot camera thanks to the sliding camera lens cover. Measuring 4.1 inches by 1.9 inches in width by 0.7 in. thick, the C905a is reasonably clumsy. It’s curved at the top and the bottom, has pointy corners, and is wrapped up in a matte silver frame with hints of dark gray. The sliding mechanism feels solid as well, and engages in a gratifying click every time you slide it up or down.

In camera mode, the left key is a shortcut to the shoot mode settings ; while the right key permits you to change the scene mode options. Between the 2 keys are a light sensor and the spokesman.

The C905a has a generous 1,000-entry telephone book, and each entry can hold 7 telephone numbers, 3 email addresses, a company name and job title, 2 street addresses, a Web URL, a birthdate, and notes.

We found the 3G speeds quite zippy ; loading easy WAP pages took only ten or so seconds, and downloading a 1.5MB song took about forty seconds. We also streamed a pair video clips from ATT’s video streaming service with very tiny buffering time, around five seconds at the most.

Video quality was average. Though the 262,000 colours on the display assists in enhancing the image quality of the video, they are far from perfect. We spotted the occasional artifact and blurry shot. This was particularly conspicuous in video with plenty of action movements.