Say you’re in the R&D labs at Sony Ericsson and you want your latest handset to stick out amid an ocean of fierce Darwinian competition. You have three possible routes:

A.) Overhaul the UI.

B.) Slap a touchscreen on the device and dub it an “iPhone killer.”

C.) Cram in a powerful camera and boost the megapixels to obscene levels.

Overhauling a user interface is freaking hard, and it’s costly while touchscreens draw unfavorable comparisons to Apple. So, you go for the Hail Mary and shoehorn that ultra-powerful camera inside the new phone.

It’s not that Sony Ericsson fumbled the slick, sliding C905a. Meat-and-potatoes features like call quality, user interface and button configuration are all passable on this handset. Goodies like stereo Bluetooth, aGPS, quad-band GSM connectivity and a selection of 3-G-powered music and TV apps fatten up the feature set, too. In fact, one could say the C905a is just as full-featured as some of Sony Ericsson’s other multimedia phones.

Ah, but the buzz about the C905a has less to do with these staples. The phone’s main attraction is clearly its pumped up 8.1-megapixel camera.

Hidden by a nifty lens cover, the phone’s camera not only takes decent pictures, but also sports a retina-dazzling Xenon flash. This addition allowed us to take a number of high-res snapshots in low-light settings, and painlessly post them to sites like Facebook and Twitter.

We were a little underwhelmed by the camera’s performance while shooting indoors during the day, but Ericsson was smart enough to incorporate some useful photo-editing tools to combat some of the shortcomings. Though we never truly got over the camera’s flat and somewhat washed out images, we did enjoy the smorgasbord of additional features that made on-the go-shooting fun — like image stabilization, a panoramic shooting mode, face detection, white balance, contrast and cropping tools. The C905a even shoots and broadcasts video at (an occasionally jerky) 30 fps. Granted, you won’t be winning anything at Cannes with the dicey performance, but it’s pretty damn good for a sub-$200 phone.

The C905a’s photographic fanfare can’t mask the cold hard truth. Even though it’s a powerhouse on the camera phone circuit, our standalone 6- and 8-megapixel point-and-shoot cameras produced richer images. Consistently. Paired with the phone’s lack of optical zoom and paltry on-board memory it’s far behind the pack of even cheap digital cameras. Of course, it still makes and receives calls, doubles as a media player and flaunts web access — all of which our digital cameras can’t do.

So, we’ll sum it up like this: If consistently crisp and vibrant pictures are what you’re salivating for then the C905a probably won’t fit the bill. But if you actually want to do something with your photos and video on the fly — Facebook posts, geotagged Flickr pics, YouTube vids, whatever — then the C905a makes for a fairly decent pocket companion for the price $180.