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By Michell Bak, 23rd of May 2008

Sony Ericsson’s sales strategy of manufacturing similar products with only physical and minor software changes seems to be a safe strategy. Personally, I’m not a fan safe strategies, but after having used the slim Z770 for some days, I do see why Sony Ericsson continuously announces phones that are very similar to already announced phones. It’s all about style and design – and that’s what’s important on the global market at the moment.

The Z770 is basically a clamshell version of the K660, which I reviewed not too long ago. In order for us to not repeat ourselves over and over again, we’ll exclude any parts of the review that has already been discussed in the K660 review. Please refer to that review, if you feel you’re missing something.

Official product pictures of the Sony Ericsson Z770

Advantages

• Very slick design and beautiful finish on the front
• Outer display is useful, and looks classy
• Impressive tactile feedback on keypad
• Tri-band GSM, EDGE and 3.6 Mbps HSDPA
• Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR
• Crisp and bright 2.2-inch inner display
• FM radio with RDS support
• Positioning services with Google Maps pre-loaded
• NetFront 3.4 with enhanced functionality

Disadvantages

• Only monochrome outer display
• Camera lacks sharpness
• Plain backside design
• Loose battery cover
• No memory card nor USB cable comes bundled
• No Flash themes

The Z770 is quite unique. It’s a new kind of product by Sony Ericsson, and the design is something we’ve never quite seen before in any previous Sony Ericsson products. This new way of thinking is something we’ll see in a few upcoming Sony Ericsson phones, although I have a feeling it won’t be particularly popular, as it’s not all positive. Because of this untraditional design on the Z770, you have a very bad sense of where the keys on the keypad are located if you’re not directly looking at it. The W980 is another one of these untraditionally designed phones by Sony Ericsson, and here most people will have a problem with the placement of the camera.

The Z770 sales box is quite small, and you get the most basic accessories and a bit extra bundled with the Z770. The Z770 comes bundled with a Bluetooth headset (HBH-PV703), which I’m going to do a write-up about later on, a standard HPM-62 stereo headset, a charger (CST-60 in my case) and manuals. There’s no USB cable, software CD or a memory card with the Z770 – I find this somewhat weird, but I’m guessing it was done to cut down the expenses. You can find my unboxing of the Z770 right here.

Slick is the keyword

Z770 is a clamshell phone for the stylish-minded among us. It measures 93 x 48 x 16 millimetres closed, and weighs in at a mere 91 grams. Its slim size and relatively low weight makes it very attractive, and there’s no chance of it not fitting in your pocket. It’s available in Exquisite Golden, Graphite Black & Vogue Red colour trimmings. My choice of colour would be the Graphite Black, although I actually do like the Vogue Red variant, this review is based on.

When closed, the beautifully textured brushed metal front immediately becomes the centre of attention. Placed in the very middle of this front is a rounded glass area that houses a backlit display, showing the most common status information when activated. It simply looks spectacular. Just above the outer display is the 2-mega pixel camera located, and just below the is a powerful loud-speaker.

Opening up the Z770, reveals a very bright, well-saturated 2.2-inch colour display, capable of showing up to 262.144 colours. I promise you – you won’t feel let-down by this extremely saturated and bright display! I find the size of the display very reasonable, and it fits this phone perfectly.
That was the upper part of the Z770 opened, but how about that cramped-looking keypad? Well, it’s a lot better than I had expected. It offers brilliant tactile feedback, and the keys feel very nice to use. The upper area of the keypad might be a bit hard to use for people with large hands, although it wasn’t a problem for me. I did experience one problem with the keypad, though. It’s just about impossible to know what key you’re pressing if you’re not looking directly at it! It’s simply impossible to have any sense of what key you’re pressing, as they’re not really separated from each other by any physical marks or so.

The backside of Z770 has to be one of the dullest I’ve seen in a long time. It’s plain, it feels cheap and it looks like the designer spent all his/her time on the front design. Apart from that, the battery cover is extremely creaky, and it’s almost impossible to use the Z770 without it creaking.

The left side of the Z770 houses the Fast Port connector, while the right side is home of the volume keys and a Memory Stick Micro (M2) slot. I personally would have preferred swapping the location of the volume keys with the Memory Stick Micro slot, but this is not possible due to a – in my eyes – major design flaw.

There’s nothing in either the top or bottom of the phone.

Behind the battery cover is located a standard BST-38, lasting up to 340 hours of standby, or 8 ½ hours of talk on GSM networks. I could generally squeeze out a good four days of normal use of the battery. This sounds quite reasonable.

Camera – why, oh why!

The 2 mega pixel fixed focus CMOS camera on the Z770 won’t make people “wow”. That’s a fact, and there’s no reason to avoid facing it immediately. Other than that it lacks some sort of flash to light up in low-light situations. Another camera limit is the camera software. It won’t let you zoom in when in 2 mega pixel resolution-setting (not that it matters, though), and because there’s no physical camera button on the side of Z770, you’re stuck with the portrait mode camera user interface, which is lagging the horizontal one in terms of usability and a few features.

Instead of having a set of horizontally placed icons you can press to active pop-up menus, you’re forced to use the slow and plain-looking left soft key menu style. This soft key is called “options”.

The options menu will give you the ability to set the following;

• View all pictures
• Shoot mode – Normal, Panorama, Frames & Burst
• Picture size – 2 MP (1600 x 1200 pixels), 1 MP (1280 x 960 pixels) & VGA (640 x 480 pixels)
• Night mode – Off & On
• Self-timer – Off & On
• White balance – Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Fluorescent & Incandescent
• Effects – Off, Black & white, Negative & Sepia
• Picture Quality – Fine & Normal
• Review – On & Off
• Save to – Mem. card & Phone mem.
• Shutter sound – Sound 1, Sound 2, Sound 3, Sound 4 & Off
• Reset counter

Are you curious to see how it performs? Check out the samples below.

As you can see, the Z770 delivers top-notch colour saturation in most cases, which is really nice. The photos aren’t always sharp because it lacks auto focus. When you’re in a range of one metre of the target, most photos will come out quite OK, though. During the test period I experienced slight white balance problems, but absolutely nothing to worry about.

Z770 does video recordings as well. They’re encoded in MP4 format in a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels. The frame rate is 30 frames per seconds, which is really nice. The video bit rate is about 370 Kbps, which is OK. The video quality is expectable – nothing ground-breaking, but it isn’t bad either. You can check out a video sample below, or download it here. QuickTime is required to watch the video below.

When you’re done shooting, you might want to check out your most recent shots. I find the photo viewer very good, and it’s loaded with brilliant features, like X-Pict Story – a cool slide show application with mood settings, effects, transitions and sounds. Another nice feature is photo tagging – by tagging your photos, you’ll always know where they are, and it’ll be faster getting to them. The Z770 also automatically sorts your photos by month, if you prefer that way of sorting.

IQ training can be fun!

The Z770 comes with three games pre-installed. These are Brain Juice, Investigators and Tennis Multiplay. I’m a huge sucker of the Brain Juice game, and I find it very interesting.

Brain Juice is an intelligence game, and the object of the game is simply to make you – the player – more intelligent by playing the daily “missions”. The game will hopefully make you sweat in both maths assignments and more logical-oriented assignments. You’ll be timed when playing, and the game also counts your correct and incorrect answers. Your total daily score is output in the so-called brain-watts.

Investigators is also an intelligence game, but not like Brain Juice. In this game, the goal is to solve various mysteries, and it’s really quite hard! I personally didn’t play it that much, but nonetheless it’s an interesting game for people who like this genre.

Tennis Multiplay is probably the best tennis game out there for mobile phones and it’s really a fun game! You can play tournaments and singles in order to upgrade your player’s skills. Duels can be played via Bluetooth, if you want to challenge your friends. If you want to improve your gaming skills you can also do a few training sessions. The graphics looks quite good and it’s easy to play the game.

Speedy Bluetooth transfers

The Z770 is a tri-band GSM phone with EDGE, UMTS and 3.6 Mbps HSDPA support (both 2100 MHz). Generally, the Z770 had a great network reception during the test period.
Z770 supports Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR, meaning you’ll get very speedy file transfers. This is especially useful when streaming your music wirelessly to an A2DP stereo Bluetooth headset or speaker. Z770 does not feature either infra-red or WLAN.

If you’re looking for a cabled connection, you’ll be thrilled to hear that Z770 fully supports USB 2.0 data transfers, and that’s it’s quite snappy when it comes to file transfers in mass storage mode.

Like the K660, Z770 is marketed as a web phone for the youth. The built-in web browser is Access NetFront 3.4, although it’s slightly enhanced compared to i.e. the one in the current K850 firmware build. One of the few added features is the mouse cursor, which makes it a lot easier to navigate large websites. Another feature making it easier to navigate larger sites is the enhanced zoom features with a zoom map.
There is no support for Flash, but some light Java scripts are supported.

Calls & calls management

Honestly, I’m not too thrilled about the sound quality during phone calls. In my opinion it’s a bit distorted, and the fact that it’s as loud as it is, makes it even harder to hear what’s being said. Having said that, it’s far from impossible to understand what the other person says, it’s just not as good as it could have been. There’s really no background noise, though, so that’s a plus. You can put in on speaker as well, which actually works quite well, although you’ll have to close the Z770 to get the best sound, meaning the microphone will be blocked.

As said earlier on, the Z770 comes with a Bluetooth headset. The battery life on this one is quite good, and it didn’t run out of battery at all in 12 days of constantly being turned on and connected to the Z770. That’s the way it’s supposed to be! While that isn’t bad, the sound quality isn’t exactly great. It feels like it’s echoing when talking in it. The microphone is quite good, although I would have prefered dual microphones. The fit wasn’t very good on my ear – the headset ring was simply too small, and my ears aren’t exactly the largest in the world, so that’s actually quite bad. The size of the ring can’t be altered. You can however use it on both your left and right ear.

You can manage your calls on the phone and set the various call settings like speed dialling. The call list holds the last 30 calls. However, if you’ve called a contact more than once, only the most recent call details will be displayed.

Various screen shots

Outer display

Inner display

Conclusion

Z770 is designed to visually impress, but it’s not bad either from a technical point of view.

The design is definitely impressive, and I absolutely love the very nicely designed front and the materials used. Apart from this, the A2 software platform is stable, and it only froze one time during a game, where I had to take out the battery in order for it to function properly again.

Z770 costs a bit more than the K660 does, and considering the feature set is just about identical, it’s not worth paying an extra £50 for a slightly larger display, and a better design, which is really a matter of personal taste, when it comes down to it. In Denmark it retails at £200 unlocked and without contract. I hope this price will drop quickly, as it’s a bit too high at the moment.

The battery in Z770 performs very well. I managed to squeeze a good 5 days of use out of it. Nothing to complain about here.

[Review based on firmware revision R1EA030]