By Michell Bak, 7th of June 2008

The Sony Ericsson C702 is the new junior Cyber-shot phone, featuring a decent 3.2 mega pixel camera with auto focus and face detection, as well as a revamped user interface compared to the K550, which seems to be its predecessor. When announced, the C702 was officially the first GPS-enabled phone by Sony Ericsson, adding the ability to geo-tag your photos, when connected to GPS satelites. To further enhance the C702’s camera abilities, Sony Ericsson got the C702 IP54-certified, meaning it is more or less dust proof and splash resistant from all angles. This will enable photography enthusiasts to take photos in more extreme conditions than previously possible.

The C702 is available on most markets in Cyan Blue and Speed Black colour trimmings. Both designs are quite different from what we’ve seen by Sony Ericsson in the past, but to tell you the truth, I actually do like the design of the C702 quite a lot. The materials used are rather nice, and especially the textured back feels nice to touch. It’s impossible to put fingerprints on the blue and grey casing, and only the area around the display can be smudged with your busy fingers. The backside cover is held in place by a rather annoying lock near the bottom. Although it does its job very well, it’s extremely hard - if not impossible - to open it without the use of a screwdriver, credit card or alike. Just below the battery cover, hides a standard BST-33 (950 mAh Li-Pol) battery, which seems like a decent performing battery, giving you about 3-4 days of use.
In the other end, we’ll find the camera and a very nice camera lens cover, that nicely slides down and back up again, ended with a lovely click-sound. Above the lens cover is a dual LED, that doubles as a flash light, when not used by the camera.

When held in hand, the C702 feels a lot lighter than it looks, weighing in at 105 grams, and I’m actually very impressed by the build quality. Absolutely nothing creaks, or fells misfitting - that’s the way, it’s supposed to be! C702 measures 106 x 48 x 15.5 millimetres, and even though 15.5 millimetres doesn’t look like much, it feels a bit thicker in real life, especially as it’s laying on my desk right now with the thin G700 and G900 smart phones just inches from it. The keypad is nicely backlit with a rather interesting-looking blue colour, which looks cool in the evening. Speaking of the keypad, it provides average tactile feedback. The alphanumeric keypad is a bit too soft for my liking, and you’ll sometimes question whether you actually hit the key or not. The soft keys, however, provide a very nice tactile feedback, with only the navigation d-pad being a little awkward to use.

The 2.2 inch TFT display located on the upper front is well saturated, and photos look bright and colourful on it. While it works very well indoors, it’s not the best outdoors. I had a hard time navigating the dark theme I had set. If you’re worried about the display’s legibility while using it as a navigational unit or for your sports tracking, don’t worry. Both applications are very bright, and they can be viewed without any problems even in direct sunlight.

Animated user interface

What struck me about the user interface in C702 was not that you can now change the menu layout (Grid, Rotating, Single icon list or From theme) or the revamped icons that look a bit more cartoon-like now. No, what struck me was that Sony Ericsson has animated just about the whole interface. Sure, the user interface was already animated to a certain extent earlier on, but now they’ve really gone for it, and almost all pop-ups are animated, as are most of the status icons. These are the kind of details that add that something extra to a product. C702 comes with five pre-installed themes, so there’s a little something for every one.

As you’d expect, Sony Ericsson’s graphical user interface is superior and the new large menu icons makes it even easier for users to find their way round the interface. It’s easy to use, and it won’t take long till you master it.

C702 comes with a bunch pre-installed applications - AccuWeather (weather application), Face Warp (make fun with your friends’ faces), Photo Mate (tips on photography and how to use the camera), and Wayfinder 7 (GPS navigation application) with 3 months of free subscription. Apart from that, C702 offers the standard functionality, meaning an advanced file manager, multiple alarms, fully-featured calendar with tasks support, notes application, wireless synchronization services, various timer applications, flash light application, a basic calculator, as well as a code memo application. If you’re looking for editing applications, Sony Ericsson has got that covered with MusicDJ, PhotoDJ & VideoDJ for basic editing and creation possibilites for the creative ones among us.

A few games come pre-installed on C702; Brain Juice and Foto Quest Fishing. Both are games I enjoy playing, with the first being a game of intelligence challengences, and the other being a rather cool photography game, where the subject of the game is to take photos of special fish in the crystal blue waters of Paradise Island, with beach owner Ula giving you the photo challenges.

Multimedia is good

C702 features the enhanced Media application, with Games and Web feeds added as well as the option to manually update the media content, if you’re not satisfied with the automatic updates. It’s also possible to add photo feeds, presumably to use with Flickr streams and alike. The Media application is pretty snappy, although it’s actually somewhat slower than that of G700/G900 in some areas. Rendering of photo thumbnails is quick, and it’s a breeze to browse through your recent snaps, as well. A standard headset comes with the C702 to use with the well-performing music player. The overall Media interface is nice.

The camera is one of the important features of the C702. I like the fact that it features face recognition, as it automatically adjusts the lighting to the face(s), if you’re doing portrait shots. Face recognition works excellent - even on monitors(!) - but it’s not possible for the C702 to recognize a face, if the person isn’t directly looking at you. With the ability to geo-tag your photos, you can take your photos with all the technical GPS stuff and HSDPA connection for the maps running in the background, without you having to think about it. That’s actually rather nice. Apart from that, C702 offers the usual Cyber-shot camera settings.

When it comes down to it, it’s all about camera quality, rather than camera settings. While C702 is not the best camera phone by Sony Ericsson, the photos are definitely printable and viewable on just about any monitor. The photos are very often nicely saturated, and are generally reasonably detailed, although it’s obvious that the noise reducion at times just doesn’t cut it (and at times, overdoes the job). Below are some camera samples.

Video clips are recorded in MP4 format (H.263 codec) in QVGA resolution (320 x 240 pixels) at about 25 frames per second (variable), with a bit rate of about 350 - 400 Kbps. While this should do for most people, it’s not superb quality, and I’d love to see some improvements on this side in the future. What’s more is that there is a small firmware glitch that makes it possible to set the focus of video recordings - if you take a picture of something up close, and then afterwards decides to do a video recording of the same thing, the focus will still be set to the object being up close. Whether this is a good bug or not, I’ll leave to you to decide. Below is a video sample. If you can’t watch the video, you can download it here by right-clicking and choose “Save as…”.

Impressive GPS

The “Location services” menu spot holds quite a handful services. First up is Google Maps for mobiles, which is awesome but costly on mobile phones. Next up is Navigation, which is WayFinder Navigator and is used for GPS navigation. WayFinder Navigator makes use of your active Internet connection to download maps, and as far as I’m aware, it’s not possible to download maps on your computer to transfer to the phone. Tracker is the name of the next application on the list, and is one of my favourite applications on the C702. It is basically a sports trainer application for tracking your sports activities. You can train with the GPS only, based on time, distance, route (requires Internet connection or previously tracked route) or simply without limits. While training, the C702 will display your time, pace and distance on the display, and if you’re running a route, your route progress can also be visually displayed. You can save routes if you want to run them later to improve your monthly saved results. If you want a more detailed report on your training, you can set up a profile with your gender, height, weight and year of birth. The C702 can then calculate your energy consumption, which is a nice feature indeed.

OK, enough about the navigation applications… how does the GPS really work? Well, quite brilliantly! The initial cold GPS fix took no more than two minutes indoors at a Chinese restaurant, which is extremely impressive. On the way home, C702 was connected to 4 GPS satelites within 5 seconds, and immediately started measuring the pace of the car, although it was a bit inaccurate (+/- 5 mph). So, how well does it track your training routes and alike? Very well, as well. I had a run (well, walk) down to the local shop and back (about 550-600 metres total), and C702 showed 511 metres, which is quite accurate, considering I started walking down there immediately, before it was fully connected to the GPS satelites.

If you want an even faster GPS fix, and possibly also a more stable one, it’s possible to enable Assisted GPS, which makes use of the cellular networks to get a GPS fix. This does cost a bit on your mobile data bill, but it’s usually only about 5 kilobytes for each fix.

Overall

The C702 is a nice device, and left me impressed enough to recommend it. I feel there’s definitely room for it on the global market. No doubt this will be a success, and it’ll be a device to further strengthen Sony Ericsson’s portfolio.

I really like the GPS in the C702. In my opinion, it works very well, and is fairly accurate. I’m not sure I like the navigation solution, as I would have preferred having the maps on the memory card, rather than being downloaded over the air, as it’s less costly [update: This is in fact possible on MyWayFinder.com]. The user interface & Media application are both huge advantages, and makes the C702 an even more attractive device. The design - and build quality in particular - also add to the attrativeness of the C702. I also like the fact that C702 features 3.6 Mbps HSDPA, as well as speedy Bluetooth 2.0 (+ EDR) transfers, measured up to 160 KB/s.

There’s not much to dislike about the C702. It pretty much does what it’s supposed to do, and it generally does it well. As said just above, I personally like the design, but this is obviously an arguable matter of taste. In addition, the alphanumeric keypad isn’t excellent, and the battery cover lock is hard to open without the use of additional tools.

You can check out our large C702 gallery over here. An unboxing of the C702 can be found here. Instead of posting a full review of the C702, we’ll leave you with this preview, and a review of the C902 later on. Feel free to ask questions in the comments section, if you miss anything.

[Preview based on firmware revision R3BA030]