Zoom Power

With its 8-megapixel camera and pretty low price, the silver Sony Ericsson C905a ($180 from AT&T (NYSE: T) with a two-year contract and mail-in rebate or $50 from Amazon.com with a contract) is a fair option.

The handset is thick but compact, with a slide-out keypad on the bottom. There's no touch screen on the C905a, but there are plenty of buttons to help you along: Dedicated "scenes" and "shoot mode" buttons let you fine-tune the light settings and types of shots (you can take panoramas, for example, or add a frame around your pictures).

The C905a's 16x digital zoom was more helpful than I expected, and it seemed to work more fluidly and produce less blurry images than some other handsets. I was very impressed with the clarity of some photos I took, though the colors could have been a bit brighter.

If you like to snap shots quickly, the C905a may annoy you, though, as it doesn't have the quickest response time.