10:05 AM
Raj
A good phone but certainly not a music phone that it claims to be
Good design, sturdy build, good display quality, comfortable keypad, smooth interface, good battery life, FLAC format support, good web browser, ability to pause and run multiple Java applications
No 3.5mm headphone jack, poor quality supplied headset, average camera quality, sluggish media player interface, no GPS
The Zylo is Sony Ericsson's latest Walkman phone. It comes with a 2.6-inch QVGA display, 3.2 megapixel camera and HSDPA connectivity. It is also the first and only Sony Ericsson handset to support the lossless FLAC format. We tested it to see how good a phone it is and more importantly how good a Walkman phone it is.
Bundle
Design & Construction
The Zylo has a very simple but attractive design. It has curves in the right places that not only makes it look good but also feel good to hold. The handset has a nice weighty feel to it and feels solidly built. I especially liked the smooth matte finish on the front and back. The sides, however, get a glossy chrome treatment, which attracts a lot of fingerprints.
On the front you have the earpiece at the top, the 2.6-inch display in the middle and the navigation and call buttons at the bottom. The Zylo lacks a display light sensor and a front video call camera. Slide open the phone and you have the rest of the keypad. On the right side are the volume control buttons and the Walkman button, which also doubles as the camera shutter button in the camera application. Although the position of the button is fine for starting the music player, as a shutter buttons it is bit awkwardly placed.
On the right side is the dreaded Fast-Port connector. On the Zylo, Sony Ericsson has chosen to use the Fast-Port connector instead of a traditional USB port. Still, I can live with the fast-Port when it comes to USB transfers but I cannot tolerate it when it comes to using headphones. The Zylo is a music phone, yet there is no sign of a 3.5mm headphone jack anywhere on the phone. This is just sad and I don't know what people at Sony Ericsson were thinking (or smoking) when they decided to remove such an important feature. Some Walkman phone this is.
Display
The Sony Ericsson Zylo has a 2.6-inch QVGA display capable of displaying 262k colors. The quality of display is really good. The colors, brightness and viewing angles all were superb. Even outdoors the display remains perfectly visible. The display is even better than the one on the Xperia X10 mini. Also, one of the best displays on a phone under Rs. 10,000.
UI & Applications
The Zylo runs on Sony Ericsson's A200 platform. Apart from the updated icons that now resemble the ones on Sony Ericsson's Symbian or Android smartphones (with the same default light blue theme) there isn't much of a difference. The interface on the Zylo was blazing fast and very smooth. The menu animations were extremely slick, thanks to a faster processor or higher amount of RAM. Unfortunately though, for some reason the media player wasn't quite as fast. It became even more sluggish when you start playing music on it. And I was only using a 1GB memory card with it. I wonder how slow it would become if one were to put in a 16GB card and load it with media files.
ConnectivityThe Zylo is a GSM quad-band handset. It also supports dual band HSPA connectivity (7.2Mbps download 2Mbps upload), along with Bluetooth v2.1 and USB. Unfortunately there is no Wi-Fi or even GPS, of which the latter should have been provided, as many cheaper phones come with it these days.
Call quality was good on the Zylo and so was network reception. I observed that the network strength indicator on the Zylo was very sensitive and even if you move the phone around a little the network strength changes dramatically. Not that it has any effect on the call quality, but you might see that the network strength seems a bit low when you compare it to some other handset with the same network in the same area.
I like the web browser on these Sony Ericsson phones. The Access NetFront can handle both mobile optimised sites and full blown websites well. The phone also seems to have enough memory on board to not choke when loading a heavy webpage. There is no Flash support, which is fine, because as we have seen, Flash on mobile phones only does more damage than good. The browser has a download manager, which is a separate application. So you can start a download and quit the browser and the download will continue in the background in the download manager.
The Zylo also comes with Google Maps pre-loaded, however, there is no GPS on-board, so you can only get an approximate location.
Multimedia
The Zylo is supposed to be a music phone, something it fails at spectacularly. First of all there is no 3.5mm headphone jack on the phone. The headset that comes in the box is of similar quality to what one may find people selling on train stations in Mumbai. For a company reputed for providing top quality headphones in the bundle with their music phone, this is completely unexpected and appalling. What makes it worse is the fact that the Zylo supports files in FLAC format. Does Sony Ericsson really expect us to listen to FLAC files on the headset they provided in the package?
The reason I find all this frustrating is because the Zylo comes with the Walkman brand name on it. Walkman is by far one of the most respected brands around and it is a shame to see Sony Ericsson use it so carelessly on such devices. No wonder the brand is loosing its popularity these days. Although Sony Ericsson did good by reviving it with their music phones, they are now diluting it with devices like Zylo that don't even have a simple 3.5mm headphone jack on them.
The rest of the multimedia experience is pretty average. It comes with a 3.2 megapixel camera that neither has autofocus nor a flash on board. The camera quality too is underwhelming. I'm thankful Sony Ericsson did not put the Cyber-shot brand name on this phone.
Battery Life
The Sony Ericsson Zylo comes with a 920 mAh Li-Ion battery. The battery life on the phone is really good. I once forgot my charger in office and wasn't supposed to go the next day. I had completely forgotten about this and used my phone as I normally would with heavy web browsing and a few calls in between. Thankfully the battery lasted a good two-and-a-half days. Anything less and I would have been stuck with a dead phone for a while.
Verdict
The Sony Ericsson Zylo is priced at Rs. 8,500. Despite its flaws, I liked the Zylo. It has a very likable design; the fit and finish, and the build quality, especially of the slider is superb. The display quality is also pretty good, something that you won't find in phones in this price range. The web browser is good, which makes me happy, as I browse a lot on phones. The keypad is great as well, which again contributes to my heavy typing needs. The battery life on the phone is also pretty great.
What I don't like about the phone is the music playback. Despite the fact that the phone is touted as a Walkman phone, the Zylo lacks almost everything that a good music phone is supposed to come with: a 3.5mm headphone jack,
In the end, the Sony Ericsson Zylo comes across as a good phone. But it's not the music phone that it claims to be.
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