// Pocket Picks //

With the release of the Sony Ericsson C905 imminent, it looks as though the days of the stand alone digital snapper may well be numbered. It’s not as if we haven’t crossed paths with the C905 before, but seeing as it’s about to be unleashed, it’s worth taking a thorough look at just what all of the fuss is about.

Obviously the big feature here is the 8MP camera, churning out images at 3264×2448 pixels, and video shoots at 30 fps. Couple that with a 2.4 inch TFT screen and you’re looking at the kind of performance that could genuinely cannibalize Sony’s line of digital cameras, so it’s a brave move in that sense.
The phone also has a built in GPS satellite receiver which allows you to ‘geo-tag’ your pictures. Basically this means you can use your phone’s GPS to automatically tag your pictures with the location they were taken in, which is a pretty neat little feature. The C905 is also a quad band effort, so you can take it anywhere in the world with you and create a nice globe’s worth of pictures (provided you have an unlimited travel budget or a magic portal or something).

There is of course the now standard (for high-end handsets anyway) picture blogging for Facebook, MySpace, etc., along with an RSS reader for keeping up to date with whatever you want. The phone, as you might expect, has decent media credentials for both music and video too, but all these features do come at a price.

Initial reports are that the C905 is a little less then svelte, but then, if you are looking for a quad band, GPS enabled, 8MP camera phone, chances are you are the sort of person who is not especially bothered by the device’s relative huskiness.

So, all things considered, the Sony Ericsson C905 sounds like a real winner. It might not be the first 8MP camera phone to hit the UK market (that accolade goes to the Samsung Inov8) but in terms of snapping up a chunk of the high end camera phone market, the C905 looks set to conquer.