Sony Ericsson Zylo review, Price, pictures, Details, model specifications

2010/07/31

A small and sexy music slider – that’s what the Zylo is. Nothing more, nothing less. Sony Ericsson are probably hoping to start bringing up the next generation of loyal users. You know, give a kid a walkman and they will be coming back for more. The Zylo has the catchy beat and the good looks – and it’s got the social bug. Music and social networking are perhaps top of the young user’s list of needs and the Zylo meets them at a canter.

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But besides that, Zylo is a phone for the brokenhearted. A thing to help you remember. And we need to give it to Walkman phones – there is much to recall fondly. Whether Sony Ericsson are about to breathe new life into the W-brand or just shaking the dust off an old prototype that never got into production, the Zylo deserves credit for keeping the Walkman spirit alive.

Key features

Large 2.6″ 16M-color TFT screen, 240 x 320 pixels, scratch-resistant surface
Quad-band GSM support
Dual-band 3G with 7.2Mbps HSDPA, 2Mbps HSUPA
3 megapixel fixed-focus camera; VGA@24fps video recording
FM radio with RDS
Stereo Bluetooth 2.1
microSD card slot, 260 MB internal memory
Environment-friendly package
Social networking integration, widget-enhanced interface
NetFront v3.5 web browser with full Flash support
Very good audio output quality
Accelerometer sensor for UI auto-rotate
Smart dialing

Main disadvantages

No 3.5mm audio jack
No standard USB port
No bundled data cable or memory card
No camera lens cover
No document viewer

The Sony Ericsson Zylo is a cheap but stylish slider with a Walkman badge. It comes with fast HSPA support, but this is all the high-end connectivity you could expect. There are no premium features such as Wi-Fi and GPS. What puts an upsetting question mark on the whole package is the absence of a 3.5mm audio jack. It’s a cheap phone alright, and we know better than expect a proper audio plug in a Walkman. Doesn’t make sense but that’s how it is. Out of all W-line phones, there’re only two exceptions: the premium W995 and the dirty-cheap Spiro.

The latest feature phones by Sony Ericsson are keen to treat users to great social networking integration. The Zylo is no exception here. It gives you all the social stuff right on the homescreen with a solid widget set running live updates.

User interface is nice as usual

The Sony Ericsson Zylo has the regular Sony Ericsson feature phone UI. The Flash interface is well familiar and deservedly praised for its looks, speed and multitasking ability.

The standby screen is arranged in the usual manner with status readings on top for signal strength, currently used data carrier and battery status. At the bottom of the display are the soft key labels.

As usual, you can use an application as a background instead of an actual image and as of late Sony Ericsson feature phones have widgets on the homescreen.

There are a total of five homescreen widgets on the Zylo: Facebook, Music Genie, MySpace, Twitter and Walk Mate.

Each of the preloaded widgets takes almost the whole standby screen, so you can only have one visible at a time. But they can all be working at once and easily switched between using the D-pad.

You get to select which widgets will be active and you may choose to enable all of them. Pressing the Up key on the D-pad lets you manage the widgets and set their behavior.

Walk Mate should be familiar to Sony Ericsson users – a simple step-counter, which works in the background. It has a green twist this time around and is aptly called Walk Mate Eco – it converts your walking exercise into saved CO2 emissions, which of course only makes sense if you’re walking outdoors.

As for the Music Genie widget, it is a shortcut to the Dance! Music Genie game as well as to the Message composer, Phonebook, Web browser, Calendar and the Alarm apps.

The good old phonebook

The phonebook has space for 1000 contacts and 7000 numbers. You can choose to view contacts in the phone memory or on SIM, but not both. Either way you can set up the phone to auto save to SIM all contacts that are being saved to the phone memory. You can also back up your entire contact list on the memory card and restore it from there.

Telephony is fine

Handling of calls is excellent and we didn’t experience any voice quality or reception issues with the Sony Ericsson Zylo. Call clarity is great in both the earpiece and speakerphone.

The Zylo supports video calls but since it lacks a dedicated video-call camera, you’ll have to use the main one on the back.

Smart dialing or “Smart Search” as Sony Ericsson call it, is a great boost to usability. It looks up contacts whose numbers contain the digits you have typed or whose names begin with the corresponding letters.

Messaging is traditionally excellent

The Sony Ericsson Zylo handles all common types of messages, all of which – save for emails – share a common inbox. The phone also supports push email but can’t handle any attached documents (such as .xls, .doc, or .pdf files for example) due to the lack of a document reader.

Much like all the recent Sony Ericsson phones, the Sony Ericsson Zylo has enhanced message sorting – the so-called Conversations mode, a.k.a. Threaded messaging. We missed a preinstalled IM client though.

Going back to Conversations mode – it is the alternative conversation-style layout and displays messages in threads. All texts to or from a certain contact are displayed in speech bubbles much like in an instant messenger program.

The Media Center is the place for fun

The Sony Ericsson Zylo runs the flash-based Media Center. Its menu lists the Photo, Music, Video, Games, RSS feeds and Settings icons. As we already said, there’s an accelerometer on board so auto screen rotation is enabled.

Walkman music player

The Zylo has the latest Walkman player. Across the Media Center menus, you can enjoy screen auto-rotation. The player is compatible with numerous file formats, including the regularly used MP3, WAV, WMA, M4A and E-AAC plus the MegaBass equalizer preset and Stereo widening. Surprisingly, the Zylo also supports the HD FLAC audio format – an open-source lossless audio codec.

The interface colors of the Media center vary across different themes. The Walkman player on the Zylo also offers fun Styles – skins that change the look of the player into a vinyl record player, a reel-to-reel tape player, CD player and others.

Image gallery

The Photo gallery stores the shots you’ve taken along with the pre-bundled wallpapers. Luckily, auto rotation is available so you can still rotate images to landscape orientation not only manually but automatically as well.

Images are generally displayed as a 3 x 4 grid of thumbs. The shots in the dedicated Camera Album are sorted by the date they were taken on.

Opening an image makes the thumb zoom in to fullscreen view mode, while exiting the fullscreen view zooms out to thumb view.

Unfortunately, the Photo gallery can get quite laggy when there are a lot of photos in a folder. At times, the phone froze for a couple of seconds before moving on.

The dedicated Photo viewer

The Sony Ericsson has no inbuilt GPS receiver but it still can geotag camera images (using Cell-ID). Then, you can use the View on map option in the image gallery. It allows you to check the place where the shot has been taken directly on the map using the preinstalled Google Maps application (data charges may apply).

Video player does subtitles

The video player in the Media center supports fast-forwarding and rewinding, and the interface is simple and stylish. The video files are accessible via the file manager too. Display mode automatically switches when the phone is rotated. It works with the MP4 and 3GP video formats.

FM radio with RDS and TrackID

The inbuilt FM radio of the Sony Ericsson Zylo has memory for 20 stations and supports RDS. It has a nice interface and makes great use of the TrackID music recognition service. The radio can be minimized in the background much like the music player.

Very good audio quality

Unsurprisingly the audio quality of Walkman-branded Sony Ericsson Zylo is great. The handset performed excellently in each and every part of our traditional tests, scoring some pretty nice results.

The frequency response is perfect for the entire audible range, the greatest deviation being hard to detect even in lab conditions. The signal-to-noise ratio is also excellent and so are the dynamic range and the stereo crosstalk.

3 megapixel fixed-focus snapper

As you already know by now, the Sony Ericsson Zylo has a 3 megapixel camera capable of producing images at a maximum resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels. There is no LED flash on board.

The features include user-controlled white balance, shot and metering mode, geotagging, a self-timer and various color effects. You can capture panos by taking three consecutive shots using the dedicated shooting mode.

The camera has the familiar user interface. Its pop-up sub-menus enhanced with icons and the Multi Menu packing all the available settings are here to facilitate the user.

Image quality

The Sony Ericsson Zylo snapper managed to impress us. We’re used to seeing images affected by too aggressive processing. Well, this is not the case here. That means that you’ll have to add some final touches to the images taken with the Zylo but that certainly is the better case scenario.

Contrast and colors are fine and there isn’t much noise to see. We were glad to notice that there were no artifacts caused by oversharpening. As for the amount of detail, it is fair for a 3-megapixel shooter.

As there is no autofocus, close-ups are a no-go for the Zylo.

Connectivity is decent

The Sony Ericsson Zylo scores average on connectivity options. Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and 3G (two localized versions with dual-band and single-band network support) are all on board as is HSDPA (7.2 Mbps).

Besides the network-based connectivity, the Sony Ericsson Zylo offers the usual Bluetooth v2.1 and USB options, though you’d need a Sony Ericsson Fast Port to USB converter. There is also A2DP support allowing you to listen to music on a stereo Bluetooth headset.

Then there’s the hot swappable microSD card – it is the fastest way to transfer large amounts of data.

A nice web browser to match the great screen

The Sony Ericsson Zylo comes with the nice Access NetFront web browser v3.5 featuring the extended home screen, also available in the other recent Sony Ericsson handsets. Plenty of shortcuts arranged in a tree structure are listed on the homescreen right under a search and an address bar. The appearance of the home screen changes to a different bright color each time you start the browser.

Organizer

The Sony Ericsson Zylo offers a wide range of time-management features as usual for its class. There is an Organizer icon in the main menu and it contains several applications: a File manager, Java Applications, Video call, Calendar, Tasks, Notes, Synchronization, Timer, a Stopwatch and a Calculator.

The Calendar offers monthly, weekly and daily views. When you save a birth date in the phonebook, the phone prompts adding it to the calendar too. There is just one general-purpose type of entry in the Calendar, but it features enough details. Notes are composed similar to messages and the T9 dictionary can be used here as well.

The Alarms application hardly needs any explanation. There are five alarm slots available. Each one offers a lot of options – you can choose to repeat the alarm on chosen days of the week or everyday.