Sony Ericsson Zylo deals & review

Reviving the Walkman line, but minus the “W” branding, the Sony Ericsson Zylo is a mid-tier non-smartphone handset that brings back the Walkman heritage to a market that must have missed one since the last time its Walkman flagship W995 was released. 

This time, it’s no flagship but sports a stylishly elegant slider form factor reminiscent of the W225 but with a beefier set of features. It even comes in jazz black, swing pink and chacha silver body colors you can choose from.

Typical 3G Phone Features

The Zylo gets 3G coverage from its dual band UMTS (900/ 2100) radio as well as 2G on a quad band GSM (850/ 900/ 1800/ 1900) radio. Data connectivity is served with Class 10 GPRS/EDGE data speeds that can reach 236.8 Kbps on the 2G network. 

Its 3G data connectivity gets HSDPA at 7.2 Mbps and HSUPA at 2.0 Mbps for amazingly fast online browsing experience. As a mid-tier handset, it’s not blessed with hotspot support as it has no WiFi. There’s no SatNav functionality either. But you still get local high speed data connectivity from its Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0 for wireless and wired data options, respectively.

The handset images with a standard 3.2 megapixel digicam with video calling support but enjoys no autofocus or LED flash typical of average mid-tier mobile phones for the last 2 years. 

With its closed slider body measuring 103 x 52 x 11.5 mm, your images get displayed on an above average 2.6-inch TFT LCD display with QVGA resolution and 256k colors. The screen gets to benefit from a scratch resistant surface and a standard accelerometer for auto rotate UI viewing convenience.

Onboard memory comes with a decent 260 MB with external memory expansion for up to 16 GB from its microSD card slot.   Its standard Li-Ion battery yields a modest 4 hours of talk time on the 2G/GSM network with 340 hours on standby time. 

Walkman Features

As a music phone that carries the Walkman heritage, the Sony Ericsson Zylo has no 3.5mm headphone jack which is a throwback to the earlier Walkman phones and does little to enhance the name especially among those who prefer to use wired high fidelity headphones.

But for users bothered with all that dangling wires on your body, it has A2DP profile support via Bluetooth for wireless stereo listening. You just need to spend for a stereo Bluetooth headset.

The Zylo comes with the latest Walkman Player 4.0 which also appears in many of Sony Ericsson’s recent mid-to-high end handsets. But on top of the usual MP3, eAAC+ and WAV audio files, the player can decode high resolution FLAC files for high fidelity music playback. 

Too bad, you can’t use your Hi-Fi headphones to fully benefit from it. But no matter, you can use the proprietary earphones to listen to music while surfing over 3G or getting in touch with your SNS friends – a unique feature of the new generation Walkman phones. The player also comes with video playback support for files in the MP4 and H.263/H.264 formats.