Sony Ericsson Z520i review

Features
The Z520i's most interesting feature is the hidden blue lights that sit around the keypad and flash. They can be set to flash when you receive a call or a message and you can even assign different types of flashing to different people in your contacts. This means that if you set your phone to silent and you see it flash a certain way, you know exactly who's calling you.

The VGA camera can take still shots and videos. You can select a variety of shoot modes that include panorama and burst, which takes four photographs in quick succession. You can add fun frames, such as a rabbit with room for a new face, to your photos. The night mode works well and is useful for taking shots in low light, but there's no flash. When you want to view your photos you can select the slideshow feature to view all your photos without having to scroll through each one, which is very useful.

You can also use this phone hands-free with the speakerphone and use voice commands to dial contact numbers without touching the keypad. Voice dialling is activated by holding the volume button or by using the magic-word feature. This allows you to say a word into your phone for hands-free access to voice dialling -- so you can say 'rumpelstiltskin' and then somebody's name, and the phone dials the number for you. We didn't have much success with this, so you may need to experiment with different (perhaps simpler) magic words. When we used the volume control to activate voice dialling, it worked well.

The Z520i does not suffer from a lack of features, but it could do with a megapixel-resolution camera and memory expansion slot. With only 16MB internal memory, it doesn't have much space for storing photos and MP3s. You could store only around five short MP3 tracks on it or about 15 decent-quality photos.

On the plus side, you can use polyphonic ringtones and MP3s, it has a good selection of wallpapers and themes, it has QuickShare, Bluetooth, infrared and MMS for sending files to a plethora of devices, and you can change the covers to suit your mood. The Z520i has enough features to keep even the most relentless of fiddlers happy.

Performance
Audio on calls is clear but in loud environments falls short of being completely audible. So don't expect to hear people very clearly in a busy bar or noisy high street. The speakerphone works well and provides a decent hands-free alternative, but again, it's not loud enough to hear in very noisy environments.

Battery life is around six to seven days on standby, and Sony Ericsson quotes an impressive nine hours talk time. This means that you can chat away and not need worry too much about the phone's next recharge. The camera takes poor, pixellated photos and videos, but the extra shooting modes make it fun to use.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Nick Hide