WHEN vendors try to pack as many features as possible into a mobile phone, you would often expect some compromises in quality and features.

Not with Sony Ericsson's W902, which pairs the best camera technologies from the company's Cyber-shot line with high quality acoustics from its Walkman phones.

Apart from a 5-megapixel camera, the W902 comes with the HPM-77 premium headphones, an 8GB Memory Stick Micro memory card, FM radio, equaliser presets and other features you will typically find in the Walkman line.

The well-built hybrid is housed in a sleek candy bar shell that feels sturdy in your hands. Its 2.2-inch screen, made of scratch-resistant mineral glass, protects it from rough hands.

The Walkman button on the top of the phone could be easily mistaken for the power button at first.

Here is the smart thing: Depressing it actually takes you to the phone's media mode. Shaking the phone, with the same button depressed, switches between music tracks.

The audio quality of the W902 was one of the best I have experienced on any music phone so far. There was good dynamic range and tonal quality from most of my MP3 audio tracks.

Sony Ericsson's premium headphones seemed to make a difference - I plugged them into my older W910i and found a marked improvement in sound quality.

As a camera phone, the W902 is easy to use and sports notable features including auto-focus, burst shooting and image stitching.

In BestPic mode, for instance, you can capture nine images in succession, starting from the moment you depress the shutter halfway to right after the shutter is fully depressed.

To take panoramic images, snap three overlapping shots from left to right and the camera will sew them into one picture.

While the camera will indicate the part of an image that needs to be overlapped, the process may get a bit tricky. Some precision is needed on your part to ensure the subjects do overlap, or you will end up with repeated subjects in the stitched photo.

Overall, the camera produced good quality images as long as there was sufficient lighting. In poorly lit areas, the use of the camera's flashlight resulted in images that looked a tad washed out.

Strangely, the W902 fared well in night scenic photography, which captured surprisingly sharp images in its Twilight Landscape scene mode.

If you are a heavy mobile Internet user like me, you will have to contend with the W902's smaller screen compared to rivals in the same class, such as Nokia's N82 which has a bigger 2.4-inch screen.

Surfing the Web with the W902's built-in browser was not as fast as I would expect on my M1 3G connection. Consider installing a third-party mobile browser like Opera Mini for an enhanced mobile Web experience.

Final say

An all-rounded, handsome phone with top-notch music playback and good digital photography tools.

By Aaron Tan, a graduate student techie.

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