Sony Ericsson has proved itself to be no slouch when it comes to developing innovative handsets in the past.

But a quick look at the C902 gives the impression that it's gone back to basics with a straight-ahead candy bar style handset. Okay, so it's on the slim side, with some stylish stripes, but there are no immediately obvious gimmicks or design innovations.

But start using it and it feels like coming home – everything is where it should be, and it's a simple pleasure to handle and use.

Redesigned keypad

There is however, as there often is with Sony Ericsson, more. For instance, the titchy key layout of the K850 and other handsets appears to have been abandoned in favour of a more conventional arrangement.

But the keys on the keypad aren't flat but are actually angled downwards slightly which feels a bit weird, especially if you're used to pressing on small keys with the tip of your thumbnail.

With a little faith and practise though, the angle actually does make it easier to press the keys with your thumbprint, which is probably a more natural way of doing it, when you think about it.

5-megapixel camera

The C in the name, by the way, stands for camera (and also Cyber-shot, which makes sense, replacing the old K for the Swedish 'kamera') and that's not surprisingly the focus of this phone.

Looking at the back however, it's not immediately obvious that there even is a camera, since there's no lens in sight and no lens cover. In fact, the whole phone case slides out to the side to reveal the lens.

It's a much sturdier form of protection than the usual strip of a lens cover and feels securely built. A lovely little slice of ice blue lights up when the camera starts up too.

Sony Ericsson's cameras have been getting steadily more sophisticated over the years and this 5-megapixel number moves things along still further. It's got the usual multishot abilities of course, including the rather marvellous BestPic option, which allows you to take four pictures after and four pictures before you press the shutter.

Camera features

Face detection is now on the agenda, which means the camera will find and focus on a central face in the frame, plus there's red eye reduction and an image stabiliser on board.

There's a surprise in landscape camera mode (the onboard accelerometer automatically switches the orientation for you) when the display takes on touch screen abilities to offer eight buttons along the top and bottom of the screen.

These include the shoot mode (including panorama and frames as well as BestPic), flash, face detection, timer, macro and infinite focus, plus white balance and scene selection.

Intuitive handset

The ice blue icons look great and it's easy and intuitive to use but the way we see it there are two problems with this system, the first being that the 262,000-colour screen is smaller than you would expect (and smaller than the previous K850's come to that).

This is because the outer parts of the screen are taken up by the touch buttons, and the picture has to fit into a smaller area. We also found it a wee bit too quick to accept our selections – pause for a millisecond while you're running through the options and you'll have to go through the process again.

If you're a touch screen-ophobe however you can also use one of the keypad soft keys to bring up an options menu and make your selections that way.