Sony Ericsson Z520a - Cellular phone - GSM - folder (flip)

Sony Ericsson Z520a - Cellular phone - GSM - folderI've been looking for a Bluetooth phone for over two years now. I've never bought one before because they were always high-end phones with more features than I would ever care about using. I'd been following the Sony-Ericsson phones, but they were always expensive when new and followed the same pattern of featuritis.

I just found this phone last week, and I bought it on the spot. It is exactly what I have been looking for -a good phone with some very useful features, plus a few gimmicks for the young and hip (or young at heart and hipless). Among the more important features for me, mainly from a practicality / safety standpoint:

Voice-activated dialing (super-easy to set up, and it even recognizes partial commands -I'd set up my home number as "Call home", but it worked just fine when I only said "Home")

Speakerphone function (a little fuzzy, but serviceable as long as you're not in a moving car)

(Brightly!) Backlit, reasonably large keys

Lightweight

Small, but not too small to hold comfortably (I'm 6' 3" with large hands, and I have no problems holding or dialing)

Caller-specific ring tones to spare me from reading the display (my wedding song's playing? Must be my wife calling)

Very good signal reception (I generally get 4 or 5 bars in my home, where I used to get 1 or 2 with my old Nokia [both on Cingular])

Good sound quality, almost as good as a land line

But for me, the most important feature in a cell phone has long been Bluetooth. I really think this is the best technology to come to mobile phones, and Cingular (unlike some other cell service providers ::cough::VERIZON::cough::) doesn't cripple or limit what it can do. Without reading the manual, I quickly navigated to the phone's Connectivity menu, turned on Bluetooth, and told it to find local devices. My Apple PowerBook was right there and turned on, and the phone found it almost instantly. It paired up without any hassle (the PowerBook notified me right away when I needed to enter the passcode for a permanent pairing), and a few seconds later I was using iSync to send over my contacts, saving me a good hour of time vs having to manually key them all in. iSync recognized the phone with no issues and configuration of sync options was a breeze.

I was also able to send an MP3 file from iTunes via Bluetooth (after first pulling out the bit I wanted to use as the ring tone through QuickTime). The phone took the file without any additional software -I just used the Bluetooth File Transfer utility that came bundled with the PowerBook. The phone automatically recognized it as a sound file, put in the right place, and made it immediately available as a ring tone.

I plan on purchasing the S-E Bluetooth car kit (HCB-700) and possibly the advanced music mute to route the sound through my car's speakers instead of using the kit's speaker. Then I'll have a perfect wireless hands-free setup!

If you travel overseas, you want a quad band phone. However, until recently that pretty much restricted you to Motorola. I've had three Motorola phones, and they all fell apart within a year, so I wasn't about to buy another one. In addition, I find the current Motorola user interface (on the RAZR) ugly and hard to use.

So, I was delighted when Sony Ericsson finally released a quad band phone in the USA, and Cingular picked it up. The Z520a is a phone for people who want a phone. It's small, robustly built, and has all the features you could reasonably want for telephony. The flashing lights are a gimmick, but a gimmick that can be useful in noisy environments.

If you want to use high speed data services, this phone is not for you, as it lacks EDGE support. If you want to browse the web, this phone is probably not for you--it has a web browser, but the screen is small. If you want to listen to music, get an iPod--this phone only has 17MB free when you get it, and there's no headphone jack. If you want to take 4x6 photos, again, this isn't the phone you want--the 640x480 resolution is good for e-mailing fun web snapshots, but that's about it.

But as I say, it's a phone. It's small enough to fit in the pocket of your jeans. It'll pair with a Toyota Prius via Bluetooth for hands free use. It'll pair with a Mac and sync your contacts and calendars via iSync. It'll play your choice of MIDI files or MP3s sent from your computer as ringtones, so you don't have to pay for overpriced downloads. For my phone at least, Cingular didn't lock down the Bluetooth or otherwise cripple the phone's functionality.

I had a Sony Ericsson T68i, which was incredibly slow. I'm happy to report that this phone is lightning fast by comparison--no noticable lag in the user interface. Java applications take a while to start up, but run fine once they're up.

Why not 5 stars? Well, the inner screen is absurdly easy to scratch--you'll want a screen protector. Also, the arrow keys are a bit fiddly to press; a scroll wheel or joystick would have been very welcome.

Buy Sony Ericsson Z520a - Cellular phone - GSM - folder (flip) Now

This is a very good cell phone and Amazon.com gives the best deal. But, you can't transfer your old phone number from different provider to Cingular through Amazon.com. If you transfer your old phone number, you won't get your mail-in rebate. Please read amazon.com mail-in rebate rules carefully!!!

You can read about how to transfer your number through this link : http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/508597/102-6686881-6992121

Read Best Reviews of Sony Ericsson Z520a - Cellular phone - GSM - folder (flip) Here

We have THREE of these phones from Cingular. COmpared it side by side against the Razr.

After about 2 weeks of intensive use, we like this phone better than the Razr in everything area except for two things: reception sensitivity and screen size.

Pros:

Lighter, smaller, slightly more tactile key, and most importantly more analog sound both in the earpiece and transmitting than the Razr. It simply sounds more natural. Also, having a synthetic body (some kind of plastic) along with its lightweight, should be more durable than the Razr. GREAT talk time compared to the razr etc. Bluetooth with plantronics works just fine. Zero problems there. Finally, the speaker phone is quite usable and noticeably better on both the transmitting and receiving end compared to the Razr. Also, very consistent quality all three of our phones work identically in reception strength and sound quality. Kudos there.

Cons:

Razr has better reception. This is a big one. Our home is in the fringe area of reception in the mountains. Decending to the 'basement', we have very very fringe reception. Barely 1 bar at times. Razr takes the call no problem and maintains rock solid connection. The Sony would make the call maybe once out of five times, and then drop it repeatedly after seconds. Basically not usable in this very fringe environment. We continue to drop calls with CIngular often even with 3 bars in different environments. Not sure if it is the phone or Cingular.

Also, Razr does have a bigger screen that is just more of a pleasure to see. This is minor for us.

Currently, we are keeping the Z520 but the weaker reception than the Razr and dropped calls on all three Z520 is driving us a bit 'nuts'. We have 30 days to decide whether to keep it and are still evaluating.

Hope this helps.

Addendum after 3 weeks:

I would not give it 1 or 2 stars if I could. Called Cingular multiple times to resolve our problems to no avail and received some erroneous information. With all three phones, we would regularly drop calls even with 3 or 4 bars showing. Further, just sitting on our desk, the phone would bounce from 1 to 4 bar and back in seconds. Something is wrong with the internal algorithm. It is possible that the phone is searching for alternate bands? Can't set the band manually. VERY frustrating and poor performance after extensive testing with 3 phones.

Final update:

We traded all 3 for Razrs and the difference is remarkable. The Razr exhibited NONE of the problems of the Z520 with the many dropped calls. Simply blows the Z520 away. We tried our best to like the Z520 but am very happy with the Razr. Also, we racked up a bunch of unintentional charges with the Z520 as you can push many additional $$ services inadvertantly with just ONE button. THis happened on ALL three Z520s and was very irritating. We never saw this coming until the bill showed up. Cingular charge $20 for games which we never intentionally loaded. They did reverse charges though when we challenged it. In all, one star phone.

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We upgraded our phones right after Christmas and bought 2 RAZR's and 2 SE z520a's. My sons love their phones. My daughter and I loved ours, too, for about 2 weeks!

As much as we hate to, we've boxed them up to send back to Cingular. They are great phones as long as long as they are working. My daughter first noticed she was missing calls. She said the phone would vibrate without ringing and when she tried to answer it she could not hear nor be heard. Since it only happened a couple of times and this phone had good reviews, I didn't worry about it. Then I noticed there were times I would be talking to someone and then couldn't hear them, although the call timer was still running. I wanted to believe that Cingular was having some service problems and then it happened. I noticed my phone with it's cool lights dancing and realized that I didn't hear a ring. I popped it open to answer and got dead air. Isn't it funny how it's always worse when it happens to you? Well, this was serious.

I immediately went to the Cingular forums and found lots of frustrated people wanting help with these phones, most having the same problems with them. Those complaints weren't there when I ordered our phones. I saw today that Cingular has pulled the z520a from their sales site.

Some people believe that a memory leak is the cause. They have suggested powering down the phones each day. That didn't work for us. We put the call into Cingular, boxed up our really cute phones and are now waiting for the labels to ship them back. The new sim cards work great in our old phones. They will just have to do until Cingular puts an improved version of the Z520a or something equally cool up for sale. Something that will match the functions of the RAZR without the blocky width and it needs lights that help you find it in the bottom of a purse. I miss my defective phone!

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