Sony Ericsson Z320 Review

Interface:

We are well-acquainted with the consumer interface from many other low-class models of the company. The icons in the main menu are arranged in a 3 x 3 grid, and you can choose from a few preloaded themes. The main menu is easy to use with nothing to confuse the user. There is some lag when opening different applications, which is typical for the budget phones of the manufacturer.



PhoneBook:

Even though the main menu is characterized by the ugly icons (because of the low resolution), the phonebook is the same used in the top models of the company. It gives you the opportunity to store up to 1000 contacts also adding e-mail, web address, picture ID, ringtone, birthday etc., to each of them. Here we have the call register, combining the last calls sorted in separate tabs for calls made, accepted and missed, which is very convenient.



Organizer:

No innovations here. The organizer features the following functions: alarm, applications, calendar, tasks, notes, calculator, timer, and stopwatch. The calendar offers a view of the current month and week; you can set one single alarm and one recurrent.

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Messaging:

The messages menu is also well-known from previous models of the company; it contains options for creating text and multimedia messages. T9 can be used for faster text input.


Connectivity:

Sony Ericsson Z320 is a tri-band phone, mainly intended for Europe and Asia (900/1800/1900 MHz). An American version (850/1800/1900 MHz) has been announced, but it still has not been officially released on the market. As we expected, the Internet browser has the problems typical for the budget phones – it does not load the pages correctly, it is pretty slow (uses only GPRS), and when you try to navigate to a more complicated site, it “surrenders” by telling you “the page cannot be displayed”.

For data transfer you will have to solely rely on the infrared port, because of the lack of Bluetooth. You could also connect the device to a PC, but such a cable is not present in the package.




Multimedia:

For storage of pictures, video and JAVA apps you have about 12MB built-in memory and a memory card slot is not to be found anywhere. The available memory actually depends on the preloaded applications and in our case, we have only 9MB free.

There is no media player, but at least you can use an MP3 file for a ringtone. Sony Ericsson Z320 supports different JAVA applications, which can be downloaded from the internet. In our review unit, we had only one installed by default – the game Johnny Crash “Stunt Man” Does Texas, which is fun to play. It is a very simple game, perfect for wasting time while waiting or traveling. Furthermore, that type of cheap phones is usually bought for kids and they will love the game for sure.



Camera:

The camera is 1.3-megapixel with 4x digital zoom, intended for picture snapping only and it lacks a flash of course. As expected, it doesn’t offer any exciting options or features, but you can set the size and the quality of images, use the self-timer (on/off only), add various effects and to change the white balance. The night mode is basically useless and you’ll have to live with the fact that you can only take pictures during the day. The camera has a performance typical for a budget phone; the quality is enough to take a picture of a loved one or to show where you've been. The pictures taken with it definitely cannot be used in the family album or put in a frame and hang over the fireplace.