| Review of the Sony-Ericsson Z200 |
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The Z200 is clamshell design from Sony-Ericsson that Fido is offering as a new low-end stylish offering. While it has many aspects that are pure Ericsson, the overall design seems rather foreign to them, including a separate power button that I can’t remember seeing on any previous Ericsson designs that I’ve reviewed in the last few years. It is possible that the phone is manufactured by a different company and marketed by Sony-Ericsson, but I’m not sure. Last Updated: 11-Apr-2004 |
Before reading this review, please read Some Thoughts on Phone Reviewing.
General
Like its bigger brother the
Z600 the Z200 looks a little like two phones sandwiched together, when it’s
closed. However, that effect is far less prominent than on the Z600, and I
personally like the look of the design better on the Z200. One very strange
styling queue however is a silver strip across the top of the phone that looks
like it should hinge, but in fact is solid. The silver band surrounds a
protrusion from the lower portion of the phone that creates a sort of tab
sticking up. The tab has a big hole in it that could presumably be used to
tether it to something.
Another prominent feature on the outside of the phone is a round external
display that can be set to show an analog clock, or a digital clock with signal
strength and battery condition. The appearance of the round opening (with a
thick gold band framing it) is very handsome, but when it comes to practicality
it rates as close to the bottom of the barrel as you can get. Because the round
display can show so little data at once, it actually scrolls the text sideways
when a call comes in. If you miss the name of the caller you have look like a
complete idiot staring at a ringing phone while it comes around again. This gets
my vote for the All Style and no Substance award.
As you open the phone you are immediately impressed with how solid the hinge is.
I don’t think I’ve seen this level of quality in a low-end Sony-Ericsson phone
before, and it was very promising. Alas the screen and keyboard just aren’t up
to the standards of the hinge. The keypad is about the most atrocious I’ve
tested in ages. Not only are the keys flush and difficult to press, they also
don’t respond particularly well.
On a number of occasions I found myself confronted with a recording telling me
that my call couldn’t be completed as dialed. This was because I’d apparently
missed typing one or more digits of the phone number, even though it had felt as
though I’d correctly pressed each key. The four-way cursor pad is also a
horrendously bad design, in that it only give you a small narrow band of the key
for pressing up, down, left, or right. I found myself constantly frustrated in
my attempts to navigate using these keys. Small fingers will be a definite
asset.
The display is certainly nicer to look at than the awful screen of the
T300, but like many Sony-Ericsson models the
color display is non-reflective and impossible to see without the backlight.
Indoors the backlight is bright enough, and there is no problem, but outdoors
the display can’t be seen in direct sunlight, nor is the backlight bright enough
for non-direct sunlight. This is clearly an indoor-only screen design.
Fortunately the phone comes with a bevy of very well-designed wallpaper images
that take good advantage of the screen’s resolution and pastel colors. I say
pastel because the colors are all rather washed-out looking. So long as you
choose wallpapers that take advantage of that look, you should be happy with the
display.
Like virtually all modern phone designs the Z200 uses polyphonic ringtones, and
many of them are quite interesting. However, the ringer volume is quite low, and
once again we have a phone that it better suited for indoor use where the
background noise is much lower. Your chances of hearing the Z200 ring while in
your pants pocket walking down a noisy street is slim-to-none.
The menu system is pure Ericsson, and while that’s a good thing for people who
are accustomed to the Ericsson way of doing things, it lacks one feature that is
practically standard on every other manufacturer’s phones. I’m talking about
soft keys. The Z200 has none (well, many Sony-Ericsson phones don’t), and as
such all of the user interface semantics are based on the Yes and No keys. In my
opinion this is an unnecessary compromise that most people will find difficult
to adjust to if they’ve previously been used to working with other phones.
Beyond that however, the Ericsson menu system is no better or worse than any
others out there.
The T9 implementation in the Z200 is fairly good, but it doesn’t seem to support
contractions. However, when coupled with the rather poor keypad the quality of
the T9 implementation is rather moot. So long as you can potentially miss
pressing keys, you will forever be frustrated by the task of entering text
anyway.
Unlike the T300 unfortunately, the Z200 does not provide a POP3 client, and so
you won’t be able to use this phone to transmit and receive email messages.
Despite the overall look of the Z200, it is a lesser phone than the T300.
Battery life is pretty good, but that seems to be the case with all
Sony-Ericsson phones. I never actually ran the battery down during my tests, but
it would be my guess than you could easily get 4 to 5 days (or more) of pure
standby out of the phone, even though it has a fairly small battery.
RF Performance and Audio Quality
When it came to the actual performance of the Z200, I was
left feeling very disappointed. The RF
abilities of the phone were well below par, and very much like the sort of
performance we used to get on earlier Sony-Ericsson products. The RF sensitivity
falls markedly short of my Nokia 6310i, and the
on-road performance of the phone was only average. Handoffs are dealt with well
enough, but I’ve heard much better phones.
Incoming sound quality was generally rather poor.
The tonal balance was pleasant enough, but it lacked any low-end what-so-ever,
thus giving it an AM-radio type sound. The real problem was sound reproduction
though. When the source audio was loud it would sound fairly good, but as the
volume of the source went down a severe distortion became increasingly evident.
When compared to the Nokia 6310i on low-volume sources the Z200 sounded coarse
and distorted, not unlike a cheap AM radio on which the battery was running low.
The Z200 that Fido lent me came with an Ericsson earbud, though I've been told
that ones they are selling to the public do not. While previous
Ericsson earbuds I’ve experienced were fairly good, this one didn’t impress me
at all. It might not be the fault of the earbud, but rather the phone itself.
Either way, the sound is worse than you get on the handset, and it’s just not
loud enough.
Outgoing sound quality wasn’t half bad though, with fairly good tonal balance
and a pleasing quality to it. It even did fairly well when used in a very noisy
environment (such as my wife’s 1977 pickup truck travelling at 120 km/h on
Highway 401). It wasn’t quite as good as the Motorola V300, which I was testing
at around the same time. Knowing that it handles such conditions isn’t of much
value since the earpiece volume isn’t really loud enough to hear your caller
anyway. At any rate, outgoing audio quality is probably the only good
performance feature of this model.
So in summary, I wouldn’t really recommend this phone to anyone. Its poor RF
performance, poor incoming sound quality, faint ringers, poor keypad, and
ridiculous external display add up to a very frustrating phone. Clearly the Z200
is designed for looks, and those who are more interested in looks than they are
in functionality might be pleased with it. The rest of you would be doing
yourself a huge favor by considering other phones in the Fido lineup.
