As some of you might remember, early last year I got seriously miffed at Verizon deciding they wanted me to do their clerical work for them so I left, heading to Cingular and a GoPhone. I liked that little Sony Ericsson phone so much, when I finally changed plans and picked up a new phone, I decided to stick with SE, so I now have a brand-spankin’-new Z520a camera phone.

This phone is seriously cool…photo/movie camera, media player, all the bells and whistles including Bluetooth and Infrared which makes connecting to wireless headsets or computers a snap. (Remind me to tell you sometime about the $16 Bluetooth headset I picked up at The Geeks, only requiring a bit of engineering to the power supply.)

Ok, the camera is serviceable but nothing to write home to Mother about; has a 4x zoom (although in the default mode it’s only 2x), and manual aperture adjustment (which did come in handy trying to sneak a photo of the Katester at swimming lesson the other day). There’s no flash, and low-light conditions confound the camera, but some manual adjustment can help, as I mentioned. The movie section is kinda cool, taking shortish 30-second clips complete with sound, although the mic is pointing back toward the guy shooting the film, not the subject. The camera can be controlled when the phone is closed, and the small external LCD display can be used as a self-portrait viewfinder.

Click for actual-size photo taken late afternoon with the shades pulled

Still, it is seriously cool to be able to pull it out anytime and snap a pic of anything that strikes my fancy. Like the truck that parked in the way at the local supermarket…explain that to your boss, bucko!

The media player is kinda cool too, although oddly the speaker in this phone doesn’t sound as good as the external speaker in the little T237; it has a lot more volume, but not as much bass. (This is a purely subjective comment, based on my ears listening to both phones play the same MIDI file.) Unlike the T237, this phone can easily handle MP3 files as well as MIDI (and, I suppose, monophonic ringtones, but who bothers with those?), although with only 16M RAM handling photos, movies, MP3s, ringtones, and contacts, one needs to be a little careful what one shoves in there. I down-sampled Don McLean’s American Pie to 32kbps mono, which sounded ok while taking up only 2M or so, but trust me, if you’re looking for an MP3 player, grab an Inno. Yet it’s fun to have the phone play the theme to 24 while I’m running off somewhere - I mean, doesn’t everyone’s life need a soundtrack?

It plays videos in the 3gp format; ok, ok, they’re a little…small…and trust me when I tell you that there’s no way in hades someone with my eyesight is going to spend time watching any serious videos on this thing. But I converted a silly cat video Hal Stone sent to Katie to the format, loaded it on the phone, and she plays it over and over, giggling all the while. I always said I’d never use TV as a babysitter, but I never said anything about a cell phone!

The machine does have a reasonably powerful computer, too; while playing American Pie, I used Bluetooth to transfer an episode of Jonathan Thomas and his Christmas on the Moon and the music didn’t break a sweat. I also have to admit the somewhat “tinny” quality of the external speaker is a lot less noticeable when listening to OTR, since much of surviving Old-Time Radio is pretty compressed frequency-wise already.

The antenna isn’t one of those stubby external ones that can easily be broken, it’s an internal loop antenna. The upside is it’s unlikely the thing will get broken the way stub antennas routinely do; the downside is that leather clamshell wraps won’t fit on the phone. The antenna must be pretty darned good, though; I haven’t had any problems talking on the Bluetooth headset with the phone on my waist, even while sitting in the car.

Of course, the phone has the obligatory email and WAP browser, which I honestly haven’t yet used (I’m an old guy…surfing the Net on my telephone isn’t high on my priority list). Yes, it does text messaging, MMS, and a whole bunch of other things you really don’t want to do on a telephone screen if you’re as old as I am. And the external screen is, to my weakening eyes, sorta useless…I can’t even read the clock screen saver on the external screen with my glasses on. (Without them, I can’t even see the darned thing.)

Games? Of course we got games…all those provided with the phone are demos requiring the purchase of the “real” games, and no backups are allowed (naturally). But there are bunches of free java games out there, enough to keep my little one amused for hours on end. Yesterday, I had to charge the battery twice, and this battery usually lasts a really long time. But the charge just can’t stand up to the punishment of Katie playing games, listening to tunes, and watching videos.

The bottom line, for me anyway, is that I love the little sucker. It is light, yet has a solid feel and fits my hand perfectly. When used as a telephone, it’s comfortable and easy to hear - and with a Bluetooth headset, you don’t even need to get it out of the case. The menu structure is easy to navigate, being an expansion of the interface used in the T237 I was already used to using, and while no one of the bells or whistles is a best-of-breed, you get so many of the darned things it makes this phone fun to own.

So you can join in the fun, I include herein a MIDI ringtone of an old telephone. It cracks me up to hear something as sleek and futuristic as these modern phones sound like something out of the 1950’s…