Sony Ericsson G900 review: Symbian smartphone (See all reviews)

The G900 comes with the Media Center that we've seen on some of the latest Sony Ericsson feature phones. It provides one-click access to your photos, music, and video. The device offers you 160 megabytes of storage. In addition you can expand its memory by inserting 1GB or even bigger cards into your phone.

Here you have the fun option x-Pict, which lets you make short presentations from your pictures. You can also pick one of the four moods or the silent setup. Depending on the mood you have chosen, the phone will present you with different tunes and transition effects. We must say this is quite an interesting feature.

The G900, much like Sony Ericsson’s latest and greatest offerings, allows the user to switch to the gallery right from the camera application. In this section, the screen is filled up with semi-transparent controls, forward/back buttons, and the slideshow start key.

Unfortunately, the rather slow CPU of the handset does have a few limitations, and it’s far from as quick and smooth as you’d have wished it to be. It is especially rather slow when browsing through full 5MP photos in full view mode, where it can take up to several seconds for it to reload the next photo. The photo viewer comes with a bunch of features, such as zooming, photo tags and pretty much everything can be flipped to landscape mode.

The Sony Ericsson G900 allows you to sort music by filters such as year, genre, albums, tracks, playlists, podcasts, etc. If you want to find a particular song, but know just a part of its name, don't worry, just type it in, and the phone will automatically find and display it.

We’ve tested the audio quality with the Sony Ericsson HPM-83 headset, and found it very good. It was crystal clear, more than loud enough, and it was nice and with a good bass, thanks to the MegaBass equalizer preset.

The smartphone has a 5MP camera on the back and a camera for video calls on the front. In addition, the main-camera has a pretty good autofocus and a LED flash for pictures in poor light conditions. The camera application starts in about 2 seconds, while the focus option takes around 3 seconds.

The most important settings are available straight from the viewfinder, the additional settings menu gives access to options such as picture size, white balance, effects, storage location, and shutter sound. It’s quite obvious the camera interface has been optimized to be finger friendly, as you even have an option to select the focus area by touch.

After you set all your settings you can hit he camera button and start taking pictures. Objects within 2 meters can be light up with the flash. For objects which are outside of this range you can use the night-mode which is pretty useful.

Generally, the cellphone delivered some nice, reasonably sharp quality photos, though with a somewhat variable level of details. Sometimes you’ll get lots of details in a photo, while it may deliver the exact opposite only moments later.

Overall, the camera performs well, but we found to be way behind other modern cameraphones.

Of course the G900 can also shoot videos. These can be recorded in a 320 x 240 pixels QVGA resolution with up to 15fps, and a video bitrate of about 350 Kbps. We must say quality is not impressive at all but take a look for yourselves at our sample video below.