Sony Ericsson Z750a Cell Phone Review - Making/Receiving Calls
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Alfredo Padilla Published on June 12, 2008 Comment on this |
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| The Z750a was about average in terms of dialing speed and the call management features were good. We did find out that the phone takes a long time to start up, however. |
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Dialing Speed (5.95)
We were able to dial a number on the Sony-Ericsson Z750a in an average of 3.36 seconds. You can see below that this is slightly better than average, and sits right about in the middle of our comparison phones.
Dialing a number on the Z750a was relatively quick.
It's not as speedy as the Samsung M520, but faster than the Sony-Ericsson W580i. Flip phones generally take longer to dial simply because you have to open them up, but the Z750a's performance in this test was reasonable. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.
Send and End Buttons (3.0)
The send and end buttons on the Z750a flank the D-Pad and sit beneath the left and right soft keys respectively. The buttons are small, round and made of shiny plastic. We would have preferred that the buttons be slightly larger, with the three shortcut keys that sit beneath them between them and the keypad we can see the opportunity for mistaken presses. They don't provide much key travel and tactile feedback when pressed, either. There is a good amount of space between them and the surrounding buttons, and they're slightly raised above the surrounding plastic so you should be able to find them by feel. On the other hand Sony-Ericsson often doesn't put send and end buttons on their handsets at all, so maybe their just not used to designing them.
Call Management (8.0)
Like most phones you can access the Sony-Ericsson Z750a's call history by either tapping on the send button while on the home screen or by going into the menu and choosing the Recent Calls item. We were glad to see that either way you get the exact same interface, some phones only give you all calls with the send button and require you to go in through the menu for filtered lists. The Z750a, by contrast, takes you to a tabbed interface that allows you to view all, answered, dialed or missed calls. Unfortunately the access to call and data timers are not as convenient. To get to those you'll have to go into the settings, then navigate over to the Calls tab and then choose Time & Cost from the menu.
During a call the left soft key gives you access to an Options menu where you can add another call, mute the phone, hold the call, disable tones and record the call. The last in particular is a nice feature that we don't always see. The right soft key toggles the speakerphone on and off. Another nice feature of the Z750a is the ability to multi-task and during a call you can hit the center select key to bring up your menu and access just about any feature on the phone, including those that require data as long as you're on the 3G network that allows concurrent data and voice. Overall we were quite pleased with the Sony-Ericsson Z750a's call management features. Our only issue is that we wish the call timers were more convenient to access.
Startup to Call (2.47)
The Sony-Ericsson Z750a took an average of 40.48 seconds to start up and make a phone call. This is pretty slow, you can see below that it's slower than average and amongst our comparison phones only the T-Mobile Shadow performed worse, and given that the Shadow runs Windows Mobile, which is notorious for being slow to start up, this isn't saying much. The point is that if you turn your phone off a lot and need to be able to get it back up and make a call quickly the Z750a may not be for you. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.
Ring Volume (9.19)
The Sony-Ericsson Z750a's ring volume maxed out at 91.9 decibels in our test. We use a sound pressure meter to measure the maximum volume of the ring tone, running through all the tones loaded onto the phone. The Z750a's performance in this test was was slightly below average, but louder than the W580i or Samsung M520. It should be loud enough that you won't have problems in most situations, but in especially loud environments you won't be able to hear it as well as one of our better performers like the T-Mobile Shadow.
Ringtones (6.0)
The Sony-Ericsson Z750a supports using your own music files as ring tones with one caveat, there's a limit on the size of the file that can be used. When we tried to use a full song as a ring tone we could not, but when we cut that song down to a 30 second clip we were able to use it. As such we are only awarding half points since you can't use entire songs as a ring tone. Adding a ring tone is straightforward, just place it in the ring tones folder under music on the memory card. You can also use your voice recordings as ring tones or create your own using the Music DC application. This doesn't let you create a ringtone from music files, but you can use the built in riffs to build your own custom ringtone. We'll award a bonus point for that.
Non Audio Alerts (2.0)
The Z750a's vibrate alert is not very impressive. We were barely able to feel it in our pants pocket and have no confidence that you'll notice in your jacket pocket or a bag. The small external OLED display lights up and shows you incoming call information, but its small size means that its easy to miss as well. Point is, if you don't want to miss a call you better have your ringer on.
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