Sony Ericsson revives its Walkman line of cellphones with a new model in the form of the Sony Ericsson Zylo, where this one comes with a 2.6inch QVGA display, HSDPA connectivity, a Walkman player for those who want tend to carry their music with them wherever they go, alongside a host of other functions including Google Maps, TrackID, stereo Bluetooth connectivity, an integrated FM radio, 260MB of internal memory which can be further augmented thanks to a microSD memory card slot, a 3.2-megapixel camera and Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync support, letting you enjoy the benefits of push email wherever you are. The Zylo is also proud to be Sony Ericsson's first handset that supports the FLAC format, possibly making it

The Zylo is a more feature packed device than the Spiro, offering a larger range of features, and so attracts a more mid range price banding than the Spiro. A slide style device, the Zylo is compact, but a little thick, which gives it a slightly chunky feel, but that isn't a negative, it works in favour of the handset overall. The handset is a good weight of 115g, and measures in at 103 x 52 x 12mm. The main display is a standard QVGA resolution, measuring in at 2.6 inches and supporting up to 256,000 colours.

The display has an auto rotate feature, which flips the screen over from landscape to portrait view and vice versa, and is covered with an anti scratch surface, which helps avoid those annoying marks that easily get on phone displays from trouser pocket rub. Even so, it is still best to avoid putting your phone in your pocket or bag near coins or keys.

The main feature of the Zylo, then, is the Walkman media player, and if you are choosy about the audio quality of your music, then the Zylo may just be the handset to persuade you that a mobile phone can be a suitable device for listening to music on the move. This is because the Zylo includes support for the HD FLAC audio format, which is a very high quality lossless audio codec. The audio compression used with the FLAC format does not reduce the audio quality of files the way MP3 or AAC does, and so delivers a supreme music experience, used with the proprietary Clear Audio technology. To get the very best sound though, you would do well to use a third party headset and not those which are supplied in the box. Unfortunately, for some reason the Zylo does not include a 3.5mm audio jack, which means using an adaptor with 3.5mm connectivity.

The Walkman 4.0 player has a good selection of themes, and makes organising your music very simple. You can browse through files via artist, album or genre, and you can also create personal playlists. The device also includes support for SenseMe, which allows you to play music based on relative speed and mood of the music. TrackID, Sony Ericsson own music recognition facility is available on the Zylo, and is a good way of quickly finding out details of a song, after recording a sample to the device, it is analysed online, and the name, artist, and album information is sent back to our device, usually within a matter of seconds. There is ample memory available on the handset, for storing music, media and other files, with an internal memory capacity of 260 MB, which can be expanded with Micro SD memory cards, with the Zylo officially supporting cards up to 16 GB in size.