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Aesthetically, the Zylo is nothing unusual for Sony Ericsson. Our review unit came in a somewhat plain silver with blue highlights. The exact name of the finish is 'Chacha silver', but somehow this didn't make us feel any more excited about it.
Certainly, it's not ugly in any way, but that matt silver fascia and familiar button layout will give a lot of previous Sony Ericsson users a sense of déja vu.
The Zylo is thickest at the back, where you hold it in your palm. The sides then narrow as they get to the front, but it's a bit of a pointy and awkward shape. The rear face is slightly curved, but it makes little difference.
The phone is pretty chunky at 103 x 52 x 11.5mm, and it's easy to hold onto, but it definitely doesn't qualify as ergonomic, isn't particularly light at 115g.
When closed, the front of the phone is dominated by the 2.6-inch QVGA (240 x 320) screen. It's a lovely, vibrant screen with really appealing colours – not that we'd expect anything else from Sony.
Beneath the obligatory Walkman logo, we find two softkeys, a circular D-pad with a select/play/pause button in the centre. Left of that is the Call button, with the Terminate button on the right doubling up as the on/off switch.
At the bottom is a Cancel button for quick deletion, and a multi-function shortcut key, which is most useful for bringing up apps that are running in the background.
Sliding up, which has a nice firm motion, to reveal the keypad. It's nothing exotic – each key gives a terse little click, and is raised in the middle to aid touch-typing.
The shiny rim on the right edge of the Zylo houses a volume rocker and a button that doubles a shortcut to launch the Walkman app (it has the little 'W' logo on it) and as the camera shutter. These are both unnecessarily small.
They're not unusable by any means, but we see no reason they couldn't have been a little more finger-friendly.
Adorning the right edge of the phone is yet another Walkman logo and the lone, proprietary connector port for charging and connecting the supplied headphones. There's no 3.5mm jack here, so you're stuck with those in the box or you can buy another Sony Ericsson pair. We'll come back to that fact later.
The rear features the lens for the 3.2-megapixel camera, along with – yes – one more Walkman logo (seriously, it's like calling on a Formula 1 car).
Pop this back case off for access to the battery, SIM card slot and microSD card slot, with up to 16GB supported.
In the box, you get the Zylo, a mains charger and some earbud headphones. There's no USB cable supplied and no microSD card, so you initially have to make do with the 260MB of built-in memory. See the 'Media' section for more of our thoughts on Sony Ericsson's decision-making here.
