Let’s be honest. The earbuds Apple bundles with its iPod and iPhone range are horrible. Their sound quality is terrible, with weak bass and a tinny mid-section, they’re uncomfortable in the ears and have abysmal sound isolation.

It’s as if a decade’s progress in audio design passed Apple by, leaving you with earbuds that would struggle to impress at the turn of the century, and certainly won’t satisfy now.

If you’ve invested in an Apple audio device, it makes sense to spend a little more and get yourself a set of earbuds that do your music justice. And if that device is an iPhone, you could go for a set with inline controls.

In a nutshell, inline controls enable you to operate your iPhone from a unit mounted on the earbuds’ cable. At the very least, you can pause your music and receive an incoming call at the push of a button, while an inline mic allows you to converse without removing your earbuds much better than fishing around in your pocket for your phone.

Some headsets on test also offer volume controls, track skipping and VoiceOver support. In this group test, we take a look at six iPhone-compatible earbuds that cost under 120.

Are they comfortable to wear? Are they easy to use? Is the sound quality up to scratch? We pitch them against each other and see which set comes out on top.

The contenders

Klipsch Image S4i - 86

Radiopaq Custom Tuned Jazz - 50

Scosche IDR655m - 60

Sennheiser MM50iP - 40

Shure SE115M+ - 112

Ultimate Ears SuperFi 5vi - 60

Test One - Ease and comfort

How do they feel and are the controls in easy reach?

The optimal form factor for iPhone-compatible earbuds is a mic on one of the earbud cables, and therefore near the mouth, with the controls placed in easy reach where the lead splits in two, resting on your sternum when in use.

The Radiopaq and Scosche sets do just that, with the Ultimate Ears taking a similar approach but with much lower controls that hang near your navel. The others combine the mic and controls in a single unit. Shure and Sennheiser place it near the ear, which is fine for the mic but less accessible, and Klipsch fits it at the sternum, where this is reversed.

All the buds on test were at least reasonably comfortable, though the Scosches felt like they should go deeper into the ear. Most used rubber flanges for tips, but the Shure and Ultimate Ears sets also offered foam pads for better sound isolation.

Radiopaq’s Custom Tuned Jazz earbuds felt a bit heavy, and some users found them difficult to keep in the ear.

Results

Test Two - Audio quality Does the sound quality meet with our expectations?

We found that inline controls can take a toll on sound quality, especially bass reproduction. The Scosche sounded the best, with a crisp, throbbing bottom end that was sorely lacking in some of the others. The Sennheisers had the strongest bass, but it tended to swamp the mix at times, and overall sound detail wasn’t as good as the Sosches.

Indeed, the Scosche impressed across the board, with good range and clarity, and impressive detail and shape; a refreshingly lively sound. The Radiopaqs offered a crystal-clear top end, but the bass was so weak we had to switch to the biggest set of tips to stop it leaking. Perhaps surprisingly, the most expensive earbuds we tested had weakest audio performance.

Despite a good mix, the Shures are dull and lifeless. Ultimate Ears put in a good all-round performance without excelling in any particular area, and the Klipsch earbuds were great for definition and clarity, but the bass could be better.

Results

Test Three - Feature set

What other capabilities do the headsets offer?

Three of our earbud sets offer inline volume controls as well as a call receiver and mic, namely the Klipsch, Scosche and Shure units. Unfortunately, iPhone owners can only take advantage of this feature if they have a 3GS model (which is the latest release at the time of writing), though it works on some recent iPods too.

These same three earbud sets also offer VoiceOver compatibility. When listening to a VoiceOvercapable device such as the latest iPod shuffle or nano, you can have the name of the current track and its artist read out to you without interrupting your music. You can even navigate through your playlists from the inline controls.

All six sets of earbuds on test let you skip to the next or previous track using rapid taps on the main control button. The Radiopaq and Scosche earbuds use nylonbraided cables, which are less prone to tangling and very useful if you tend to carry them around in your pocket.

Results

Test Four - Accessories What do you get in the box, and is it worth the money?

The Radiopaq and Sennheiser sets are the least generous with accessories. Both offer three sizes of earbud tips, and nothing else. To be fair, they’re also the two least expensive sets on test, but they could have at least thrown in a small carry case.

Talking of carry cases, the other four sets all include one. Shure gives you a zip-lock bag, which is solid and protective but quite bulky. The Klipsch and Scosche sets offer a velvet and sheepskin pouch respectively, and Ultimate Ears comes bundled with a tough plastic capsule to keep your cables from tangling.

The Klipsch, Ultimate Ears and Shure sets come with a handy cleaning tool and Klipsch and Scosche give you a clip to attach the cable to your clothes.

All six earbuds offer a range of tips so you can choose the pair that best suits your ears. And kudos to Ultimate Ears and Shure for giving a choice of foam and rubber tips.

Results

The Winner / Scosche IDR655m

It was a tough decision. No single set of earbuds stood out from the crowd as being without flaws. Scosche’s IDR655m earbuds could have felt a touch more comfortable and its accessory range isn’t great.

But overall, it’s the best of the bunch, with excellently placed mic and controls, a beautifully lively sound and a comprehensive feature set, though you need an iPhone 3GS or a recent iPod to take advantage of some of those features.

The Sennheiser MM50iP set came a close second. Amazon is currently selling them for 40 very good for a headset of this quality. As long as you don’t mind one of the earbud leads being longer than the other so they sit side-saddle under your chin, they offer great value for money.

Overall results

As an increasingly robust aggregator of local reviews, Google Places is turning into a formidable opponent. Several years ago, Google paid Yelp for access to their huge database of reviews; however, eventually Yelp terminated the deal. All was well until Google started crawling Yelp’s pages for unlicensed content to populate Google Places. Adding insult to injury, Google often pushes Yelp’s data to the bottom of its review areas, favoring instead licensed partners like Zagat. Oh, what a tangled web of reviews we weave.

Beyond the professional veneer, there’s no question that Stoppelman feels burned.

The recent developments, he says, were unexpected:

“Well I think we were surprised because we hadn’t participated in Place Pages over the years. Like we were in sort of the precursor to Place Pages back in something like 2006 and then we left because we weren’t really happy in the direction it was going and we thought OK we’ll just show up in organic results and everybody is still happy. And then yeah, we found our content was showing up there and it is ranked dead last right now. I don’t think that’s sort of a permanent situation from what we gather from talking to Google, they are sort of headed in a new direction that which hopefully will be more positive.”

Yelp, of course, is not always the victim. The site has been criticized for ripping Foursquare’s techniques, with this year’s introduction of check-ins, leader boards, badges and the not-so-subtle “dukedom” honor. Now, Yelp is tiptoeing near Groupon’s turf, as it tests limited deals in cities like Sacramento. During our post-panel video interview, we got a chance to talk to Stoppelman about Google Places and Yelp’s budding rivalries with Foursquare and Groupon. See full video above— below are a couple key highlights:

On Check-Ins
-Android has been a particularly strong platform— the number of Yelp downloads grew 40% week over week for about a month. Now, its growing 15% week over week.

On Limited Sales
-Yelp will eventually roll out a product that will capitalize on its strength as a destination for time sensitive searches. “We have all this traffic, we have 35 million monthly visiting the site and so what could we do for people that are actually looking for a massage right now versus you know alerting them hey there’s this deal is available. So are there some interesting twists on just the Groupon model that we can apply because we’re Yelp.”

Though Sony Ericsson has recently taken care of the more serious phone users with the Xperia X10, the X10 Mini, the X10 Mini Pro and the Vivaz Pro, those looking for a mid-range feature have been left out for a while.

In particular, there was obviously space for a media-capable feature phone, because that’s what we’ve been delivered in the shape of the Sony Ericsson Zylo.

It’s been a while since the Sony Ericsson Aino last brought media to the masses, and though the Zylo doesn’t have all the fancy PS3 connectivity that made the Aino so unusual, it still has digital playback at its core.

This slider features support for numerous audio and video formats, including FLAC for high-quality playback. There’s also social network integration built into the Home screen, so it’s clear that the Zylo is being aimed at the digital hipster market.

The 2.6-inch Walkman phone features YouTube integration, a 3.2-megapixel camera and Sony’s PlayNow download service. HSPA 3G mobile internet is present, though there’s no Wi-Fi connectivity.

With the Walkman branding and lossless music playback, some have even been considering whether the Zylo could be the audiophile’s dream phone.

A slightly more unusual audio feature is the ability to play songs in the background while on the phone. The intention here is so you can share your songs with your friends.

This seems like an awfully quaint way of trying to avoid people swapping music files particularly when the phone features MMS, Bluetooth, email and mass storage capabilities via its miscroSD card slot.

More amusingly, the Zylo comes preloaded with ’sounds’ that can be played in the background of calls instead of music, including ambient office noises and car sounds, should you ever need to pretend to be at work still, or or broken down by the side of the road.

Because Google Maps (with Latitude) and camera geotagging is supported, you might be led to believe that GPS in onboard, but you would look a fool. All location services rely on mobile triangulation alone.

With a built-in email client and revamped threaded SMS view, its clear that no one is being forgotten for features.

The Zylo is available in silver, black and pink, and sells from around 90 on Pay As You Go

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 dja 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.

The interface is a kind of progression of the Sony Ericsson phones you’ve previously come to know and love/replace (delete as applicable).

The most obvious change from older phones is the handy widgets on the Home screen. We think Facebook and Twitter are the only two likely to be used by 90 per cent of people, but there are others to explore.

On the Home screen are softkey links to the Media app and to a kind of web search widget, which is a nice touch. The D-pad offers shortcuts to writing a new message (by pressing left) and Contacts (by pressing down).

Pressing right is unassigned, so you can choose your pleasure. Pressing up takes you to interact with the widgets.

Hit the central select key to bring up the main menu, which features all the usual culprits access to Messaging, Entertainment, Camera, Contacts and so on. Access to the Radio app is here, and not in the Media app, for some reason.

You can choose a few different themes, which change the style of icons as well as the background. You can also switch the menu from a grid view to rotating 3D view and other things that really aren’t as practical.

Tapping the Shortcut key on the fascia brings up your configurable Shortcut list by default, unless you have apps running in the background (like the radio or your music), in which case it defaults to those.

Your recent events (messages, calls) can also be accessed from here, as can some internet functions, like Google search and your bookmarks.

There’s not much in the way of revolution here, but it’s easy to forget what a simple and effective system it is.

The last big interface addition is an accelerometer for viewing certain apps in landscape mode. It’s a pretty fancy feature to have on a phone this price, and it does come across as shoehorned in, to be honest.

It doesn’t work with all apps only really those that can work mostly with the phone closed and just the fascia keys; the keypad doesn’t rotate, after all.

There’s nothing in the way of animation when you rotate, the app just appears the other way round. At first, it was really laggy, and we were ready to write it off. But it actually got quicker the more we used the phone, bizarrely.

The only apps it’s really significant in are the browser, the Media app and YouTube, but it only really has any effect on the latter. It’s nice being able to choose to view the video fullscreen in landscape, or have it smaller with other info on the page in portrait.

Don’t get us wrong, we’ve no complaints about its inclusion, and hopefully Sony Ericsson will make more use of it as a feature in future phones, we just didn’t feel the need to use it in the browser or Media app.

Sony Ericsson veterans will find the Zylo reassuringly familiar when it come to the contacts list.

You can access the contacts from either the main menu or by pressing down on the circular D-pad from the Home screen.

Despite the social networking widgets, there’s no Facebook or Twitter (or anything else) integration in your actual contacts. When you add or edit a contact, the different information fields are presented in a handy tabbed format.

The first tab is phone numbers, with internet presence (email, website), address, settings (such as ringtone and picture) and a tab where you can add information like birthdays.

When viewing your contacts, you see the phone number of each person as you scroll to them, and you can then press left or right on the D-pad to access different contact information.

Hit the central select button to see all of their information, with the select button then becoming context sensitive for whichever contact method you’ve scrolled to so when on a phone number it becomes ‘Send Message’; when on an email address is becomes ‘Send To’.

At no point does the central button feature the option to ‘Call’ you can’t just click through using the middle button to ring someone. You have to get to the number and then hit the Call button on the left of the fascia. It’s not a problem, but it can be a bit counter-intuitive if you’re new to Sony Ericsson’s layout.

Call quality was disappointingly average. We weren’t struggling to understand people or anything, but it didn’t take much to drown people out. Voices weren’t too distorted, but they simply lacked the high level of clarity we’ve come to expect from this type of phone.

We’d put the call quality about on par with the iPhone 3GS an adequate communicator, but nothing impressive.

There is one silly little niggle: sliding the phone closed doesn’t end your call. Come on, surely this is half the reason to own a slider the satisfaction of shutting it it forcefully while slipping it back in your pocket.

As it is, you have to press the Terminate button. Don’t forget that, in case you end up accidentally talking to someone’s answer machine

Again, Sony Ericsson has very firmly declined to reinvent the wheel, though we do see a little more invention and social networking coming into play.

Accessing the Messaging menu from the main menu produces the typical options for Write New, Conversations, Facebook, Messages, Email and Call Voicemail.

Conversations is a threaded view for your SMS chats. It’s not as polished as some the speech bubbles back and forth are told apart only by the direction of the points and that they’re slightly different shades of blue but works well enough to be our interface of choice for SMS.

The Facebook option simply takes you to the Messages tab in the standalone Facebook app. It’s a somewhat handy shortcut, although we often struggled to get that tab to load.

There’s no email notifications on the Home screen, like the ones you get on the Nokia C5, but setting up your email inbox literally couldn’t be easier. Simply access the email wizard and, for many services (including Gmail), just type in your name, email address and password.

In 30 seconds, our messages were downloading and we were away. No elaborate setup screens, no online troubleshooting just as email on a phone should be. Kudos, Sony Ericsson.

By default, there’s no shortcut to your email, but pressing right from the Home screen is an unattached shortcut. Accessing it takes you to the main menu, where you can navigate and add whatever you like as the shortcut destination.

We promptly added our email inbox as the spare shortcut, bringing the phone right up to what to what we expect from an internet-connected device these days.

The email inbox isn’t fancy, but it works well for the phone layout. New messages appear with a slightly bolder subject line, which isn’t the easiest to pick out from the others but does the job.

You can arrange the messages in different orders, use the email addresses in various ways all the usual email features. The software will pick out phone numbers, email addresses and web links from emails to offer you context-options for what to do with them.

As far as writing the actual messages go, the T9 layout suffices for short messages, but you won’t be a power emailer. The keys on the numberpad have a nice click giving you feedback when you hit them, but we struggled with it.

The keys aren’t very large, and we have man thumbs. Not giant, fat man thumbs, just normal-sized, but we still found ourselves mashing two buttons at once pretty often.

It’s not even close to being a deal-breaker for messaging, but be warned if you’re equally man-handed.

The Sony Ericsson Zylo is equipped with the standard NetFront browser for internet access. With 3G access but no Wi-Fi, the basic internet signal is fast enough, but not blazing.

When you first load the browser app, you’re presented with a nice Sony Ericsson Green introduction screen, where you can choose to search via Google, enter a web address or use a pre-loaded bookmark.

If you use one of the two text boxes, previously entered addresses and searches will pop up, so you don’t need to be in the Google box to access terms you’ve searched for before, for example. It’s a good little timesaver.

The actual browser seems to be quick enough at loading and handling web pages, but tends to be a bit of a car crash when it comes to formatting. If you’ve ever wondered what TechRadar would be like if it were two inches wide and half a mile long, look no further.

Mobile sites are handled better, but still look a little off, and if they should accidentally lead you to the full version of the site at any point, then you’ll be right back to scrollsville.

We tried to zoom out to see if that helped, but were told it wasn’t possible with Smart-Fit turned on.
“But surely Smart-Fit is designed to help you avoid these formatting woes,” you’re no doubt thinking. We thought the same thing. Then we turned it off and suddenly everything worked so much better.

Formatting was still a little wonky, but at least things were in roughly the right order.

The internet widgets on the Home screen are fairly useful, with the Twitter and Facebook widgets both featuring a clever design that makes the most of their respective raison d’tre.

The Facebook widget shows status updates from your friends, with profile pictures rotating round in a carousel as the updates roll in.

Twitter is simpler affair, showing one tweet at a time with the Twitterer’s avatar. When we reviewed the Samsung Monte, we were unhappy that you couldn’t see all of a tweet at one time.

The Zylo’s widget is exactly what we would hope for in a Twitter tool. That it’s on a feature phone, rather than a smartphone, is pretty good.

In both cases, selecting the widget and pressing the central select button will bring up an option to write your own status update/tweet, and the Facebook widget also then features a button to take you to your new notifications in the main app.

The Sony Ericsson Zylo’s camera appears modest right from the outset. The 3.2-megapixel sensor is a big step back in terms of pixel count from the likes of Satio, or even the Aino.

However, the iPhone 4 has reminded everyone that it’s more than just number of dots that makes a good phone camera, so we were still hopeful of some fine images from the Zylo.

There are a few options when taking pictures, like Panorama and Burst modes, not scene modes (like portrait, landscape, sports and so on), save for the solitary Night mode.

The white balance and metering can be adjusted, though we doubt you’ll ever touch them, really. You can also add a few effects (Black & White, Negative and Sepia).

Video recording is available, along with the ability to upload to YouTube easily from the phone.

Video is output at 640 x 480 and 30 frames per second, and you have the option of recording in MPEG4 for PC playback, or lower quality for sending over MMS.

(Click here for full-res version)

LANDSCAPE: There’s no detail in the trees, no detail in the grass and the greens are all washed out. Not an auspicious start

(Click here for full-res version)

NO DETAIL: This young bird was fluffy. Its wings had lots of texture. That’s all gone

(Click here for full-res version)

CLOSE-UP: When it comes to the flower in the mid-ground, they’re actually fairly sharp and colourful. Sadly, we were trying to take a picture of the big blurry one at the front

(Click here for full-res version)

COLOUR: You can barely see where one flower ends an another begins. In any case, even these colours are a bit flat none of the vibrancy the real display had

Ultimately, we were very unimpressed with the camera’s output. The video quality doesn’t really acquit itself any better.

Very little in this scene has any definition, including the grass and trees. The 30fps recording gets the cyclists’ motion fairly smoothly, but they all have a fuzzy trail of artefacts just behind them, which is a sign of the compression in the codec just not being able to keep with the movement.

It also seems to struggle to pick up much light. Any significant amount of shade causes all information to disappear, leaving just a murky blackness where there really should be some sort of detail.

Similarly, though it was overcast when we took the video, it wasn’t as grey as the washed-out colours in the video might lead you to believe.

Proving that media is central to the Sony Ericsson Zylo, there’s a softkey to the Media app from the Home screen. It brings up a scrolling interface that has clearly taken its cues from Sony’s XMB, but doesn’t use it outright, like the Aino.

From here, you can access photos, music, videos, games and even web feeds via RSS (which can be added from the browser). Each of them reveals more options when you go in, tying together some of the other apps on the phone.

For example, the photos menu includes options to browse your stored albums, as well as a link to the Photos tab in the Facebook app. The videos menu offers your stored videos as well as a link to the YouTube app.

All of the media playing options include a link to the PlayNow service, in case you’re desperate to spend some money on new content.

Oddly, the music menu doesn’t include a link to the TrackID song identification app. Seems like an obvious addition to us, but there you go.

For a handset that’s focussed so heavily on media playback, we’re just astonished at some of the short-sighted decisions made in the Sony Ericsson Zylo.

It really comes down to the phone’s unique selling point: FLAC support, or the half-baked introduction of it, anyway.

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. It’s an open source audio format capable of extremely high-quality sound reproduction.

Let’s be clear: we’re totally behind the introduction of higher-quality audio on mobiles in general, and that goes double when it’s a phone with the Walkman brand behind it.

But you have to do it right. Lossless audio carries different requirements than what you usually stick in iTunes, but nobody seems to have told Sony Ericsson.

Lossless files tend to be at least ten times larger than their lossy version we could be talking up to 100MB per song. This is fine the phone supports microSD cards up to 16GB, so you can still fit a few albums on there. Except, of course, that none is supplied.

Okay, yes, in a mid-range handset we have no divine right to a large amount memory, but if you’re going to make a big deal of playing lossless audio, it would be polite to include enough memory to hold more than two songs.

Which brings us neatly on to the lack of USB cable. Without this, how does Sony Ericsson expect us to get the songs onto the phone? Bluetooth? We tried that it works, but it takes 10 minutes. Per song.

Maybe when we go out to buy our microSD cards, we’re also expected to pick a card reader. Okay, fine then don’t hide the microSD card under the battery cover! Make it easy to get to, if we’re supposed to have it in and out whenever we want to add songs.

Last in this rant is the proprietary headphone connector (and the supplied model), which is the most inexplicable part of it all.

“Best sound quality ever on a mobile phone” is what Sony Ericsson says about the inclusion of FLAC. We’re inclined to believe them, but who could ever tell using the cheapo bundled earphones?

They’re not the worst around, but without a 3.5mm jack, we’re stuck with them, rather than much higher-quality cans for the higher-quality music we’re playing.

Fortunately, we at TechRadar have a magical drawer full of every cable known to man. It’s like the Room of Requirement in Harry Potter, provided your only requirements are obscure gadget connectors and strong Portuguese liquor.

From it, we fished out an adapter we had handy from an old Sony Ericsson Walkman phone that enabled you to plug 3.5mm headphones/speakers into the proprietary port. Just the sort of thing it might be nice to bundle in with your new phone that features super high-quality audio, eh?

Unfortunately, it turned out that our troubles with testing the quality of audio playback weren’t finished yet. We loaded on our first FLAC tester song and hit play. We got only an error message.

This was a song converted from an Apple Lossless codec file, and it clocked in at 90MB. We figured that might be asking too much of the Zylo, so we instead ripped a CD with the FLAC settings set to make it the smallest file possible.

This time, we were getting 30-40MB per song, and these worked just fine. We then loaded on MP3 versions of the exact same songs, which were all 3-4MB each.

Honestly? Underwhelming. We think the FLAC file had slightly more clarity to both the bass and vocals, but in most songs we couldn’t tell the difference.

We actually tried a blind listening test, and we really didn’t know which was which, generally (we got some right, but then we did have a 50/50 chance). That didn’t really change when used our special adapter to hook up to a nice set of speakers.

Audiophiles even more serious than us may pick out points that make it worthwhile for them, but for everyone else, we’d suggest that this isn’t going to revolutionise the way you listen to music on your phone.

Our guess is that Sony Ericsson haven’t improved on the audio decoding chip in any way, leaving high quality music to be squished and downgraded on its way out the earphone socket.

For most people, we think the ability to carry ten times as many songs is going to have more value than an almost imperceptible increase in audio quality.

The music player is okay to use, but we weren’t blown away by it. Browsing your songs is easy enough, and you can access settings like the equaliser on the fly.

It worked, and is fairly intuitive, but it sets no new standards for music players on phones. Aside from FLAC, it also support MP3, AAC and WAV files.

The YouTube app is similarly easy to use. It’s not great if you just want to hang out among the videos and watch nothing in particular though there are options for Most Viewed, Top Rated and Most Recent but if you’re looking for something specific, you won’t be disappointed.

You can send your own videos to YouTube straight from the video media menu. In both this case, and watching videos generally, the lack of Wi-Fi can be a bit of an issue.

Unless you’ve got very consistent 3G signal, you could find videos stuttering. Similarly, uploading videos has the potential to be a nightmare unless you’re confident you’ve got a strong, steady 3G connection.

Video quality is boosted by the screen’s lovely colours, but videos with any significant movement suffered from an awful lot of motion blur. Fine for the occasional YouTube jaunt, but this is definitely not a movie-watcher’s phone.

You can load and watch movies in MPEG4, H.263 and H.264 formats.

The Radio app requires the included headphones to work, as is the norm. Hook them up and you can either scroll through the frequencies yourself, type in a specific frequency or use the ‘Search’ function.

At first, we thought the search didn’t work because nothing happened for a few seconds, then it suddenly skipped forward and settled on a signal. Basically, it doesn’t actually register that you’ve pressed the button, or tell you that it’s searching, until it finds something.

It’s fine once you realise that’s how it works, but a little bit of UI feedback wouldn’t go amiss. The clarity of the radio was good enough for a little bop along, but was no substitute for the built-in music player.

The TrackID function for identifying playing music and taking you to buy it, is built-in to the Radio app, so there’s no more waiting for the DJ to tell you what song was. In theory.

In practice, it identified nothing for us. Even with the clearest radio signal we could find, we got total rejection.

We were very impressed with the general battery life of the Sony Ericsson Zylo. With fairly standard use, you could expect to get four days out of a single charge of the 1150mAh battery.

Start seriously Facebooking and YouTubing, and you can knock that down quite significantly, though. In fact, one of the potential problems we found with the phone is that it’s awfully easy to accidentally leave it doing stuff over 3G without realising it.

There were times we picked it up after it had been asleep for a while, to find the browser running, with the status indicator ticking over, obviously trying to pick some sliver of HTML that would never arrive.

Not only is this crippling for battery life, it could be devastating to your phone bill, too. If you get the Zylo, do make sure you get a generous internet package.

Connectivity

As far as specs go, the Zylo is fairly ordinary. Bluetooth is present and handy for file transfers, and the proprietary port is capable of USB 2.0 connectivity. As we said, there’s no USB cable provided, though.

Underneath the battery cover is the microSD card slot, which is also not supplied. Cards up to 16GB are supported.

The lack of Wi-Fi is always a shame in internet and media-focussed devices, but we can’t grumble at this price. The 3G connectivity was generally fine for whatever we wanted to do but, as always with mobile broadband, your mileage may vary wildly.

Speaking of varying wildly, one foible we found with the Zylo was the signal bars. While we have no iPhone 4-style sudden drop to announce, we occasionally found they seemed to bear no particular relation to the actual signal available.

Sometimes the Zylo reported almost no signal or internet connection, but was actually fine when we opened the browser or Twitter widget. Once or twice, we found that it reported strong signal, but we struggled to get online, but that scenario happened far less.

We don’t see it a major problem (it never really interfered with our use of the phone), but it struck us as an odd quirk.

Apps

The Sony Ericsson Zylo doesn’t come with a huge volume of apps pre-loaded, but it does feature access to Sony’ PlayNow service, which offers games, apps, music ringtones themes and more. Some you need to play for, some are free it’s all pretty standard for this kind of mid-range service.

When we were first browsing through the media menu, we noticed an apparently well-stocked games section, including Bejeweled Twist, but they all turned out to be demos, sadly.

We think Sony Ericsson’s missed a trick here a bunch of free games along with the Walkman functionality and YouTube integration would’ve made this phone a real media powerhouse.

The apps you’ll use most often are likely to be YouTube and Facebook. We’ve already covered the former, so let’s talk Facebook. You can access the app either from the Applications folder in the main menu, the Facebook option in the Messaging menu, or via the Home screen widget.

The widget is great, and it’s not the only one. The Twitter widget is very nice, though it doesn’t lead through to a dedicated app (not that you need one, really). Widgets are also available for MySpace, Song Genie and Walk Mate (which counts your steps, presumably using the built-in accelerometer).

It’s great to be able to just flick between your different online presences so neatly on a phone this size. We were mightily impressed with their functionality.

Going into the Facebook app, you see tabs for News, Wall, Friends, Photos, Notifications and Messages. Going between them is pretty laggy, and the information can take a while to load, but it’s all functional and works as you’d hope.

However, for all our polite golf-clapping over how well it works, the Zylo’s Facebook app managed to royally anger us. In case you can’t see what it say in our Facebook screenshot, our last status update was “Matthew Bolton used Facebook for Sony Ericsson on a W20i phone for the first time.”

We didn’t write that. That’s not cool. In a time when Facebook is getting enough of an eyeballing over privacy concerns, either Sony Ericsson or Facebook has decided to share a piece of information about our life that we had no intention of telling anyone.

It might not seem like a big deal, and we concede that the information itself isn’t that important but that’s our decision to make. We thought this sort of practice disappeared years ago.

Google Maps is available, with Latitude support, but, as we said before, there’s no GPS, so accuracy is not its strongest suit. Most of the expected features are here though, and getting directions is spectacularly easy to sort out. It’s shame we were rarely where the software thought we were.

To be fair, given enough time it can get quite close, but then tends to suddenly change its mind by a few hundred metres. Useful for reference, but no substitute for a proper GPS system.

There also a weather app, Music Quiz (using your music library), NeoReader for reading QR codes and Checkbook for recording expenses and so on. These are in addition to the usual suspects of Calendar, Tasks, Notes, Alarms, Stopwatch and Calculator.

These utilities are all somewhat cursory, but are easy enough to use. The calendar suffers from the same issue as the email inbox, where days with events on are bolded slightly to differentiate them. That just about worked for the email, but saunters into being obtuse when it comes to the calendar’s smaller writing.

Oddly, the option to make a video call is tucked away down with these apps. With no front-facing camera, it’s probably fair for it to be afterthought. Hey, we were surprised to find it at all.

Considering that the unique selling point of the Sony Ericsson Zylo is the FLAC music playback, you’d be forgiven for thinking that’s the ultimate decider in how we view this phone.

That’s not the case, though. With its handy social networking widgets, media focus and nice messaging features, it’s a reminder of what a flexible operating system Sony Ericsson has on these phones.

We liked

The vibrant screen is lovely to use everyday, even it does struggle with video. Apps are presented brightly and text is clear.

Email was ridiculously easy to set up, and we like the new Conversation option for viewing messages.

More than anything, this is just an easy phone to use. Good media functions, background apps and the excellent widgets make this a phone that’s great to live with in the online age.

We’re also in support of the introduction of support for lossless music codecs, even if this implementation is clumsy.

We disliked

Well, you can maybe guess where this starts off. Proprietary headphone connector, no USB cable, no microSD card we could forgive these sins if large music files weren’t the marquee feature for the Zylo.

All that, and we were disappointed with the final sound quality anyway. It just feels like such a wasted opportunity.

The camera was also a low point of the phone. We just couldn’t manage to take a single good photo. The 30fps VGA video sounds like it would have promise, but it just failed to pick up enough detail.

Verdict

When we first started exploring the Sony Ericsson Zylo, and realised the massive shortcomings of its FLAC support, we were expecting the theme of this review to be ’scathing’.

Ultimately, that’s not the case. Disappointing though the lossless music situation may be, it still plays music a whole bunch of audio file types, actually. It works, even if it wasn’t thought through properly.

The rest of the phone is solid, and easy to use. The social networking widgets are excellent. We still say it’s a little uncomfortable to use for a while, but you get used to its shape.

Most of all, the raft of features packed in here is hard to fault for the price. Anyone looking for a hardy internet and media-focussed phone will do well with the Zylo.

Audiophiles we’re afraid this isn’t the phone you’re looking for. Move along.

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So now they have a new award, called the Bogan-Martin Award: “The Bogan-Martin Award is given yearly to the Flickr staff member who inadvertently generates the most spectacular media overreaction to a personal comment or inside joke.”

So who won? Daniel Bogan this year, who was also this year’s winner of the other award. And last year was Chris Martin. Both winners names link to previous posts we’ve done. Suggesting that we’re the media that is engaging in the spectacular overreaction.

Ok, Flickr. You won this round.

Steve Ballmer has admitted that Apple has sold more iPads than he’d have liked, as he defended the lack of a credible Windows 7 tablet alternative.

Speaking at a conference, Ballmer insisted that the Windows 7 tablets would not be rushed out, but that everybody was aware of the pressing need for options.

“They’ll be shipping as soon as they are ready,” Ballmer said. “It is job one urgency. No one is sleeping at the switch.”

Apple

When asked about the popular iPad, which has sold well globally despite people’s reservations about Apple’s closed garden approach, Ballmer confessed that he was not enjoying the success.

“They’ve sold certainly more than I’d like them to have sold,” added Ballmer.

The Microsoft chief executive has consistently pointed to Windows 7 tablets as a key part of the company’s immediate future along with Windows Phone 7.

A few weeks ago, we were alerted to a new site currently in stealth mode called Voyurl. As the name implies, the idea behind it is to make it so you can see what other people are looking at on the web (and to make your clickstream seen). It sounds creepy as hell. It’s like Blippy but with more potential porn. I love it.

But when I tried to sign up for the service, they sent me a note back that it wasn’t quite ready yet and that they were cranking on the beta. Fine, that happens from time to time. I can be patient. But I’m not sure I can quietly wait any longer when the site starts running ads like this.

As freshly unemployed angel investor Joshua Schachter pointed out this evening, Voyurl has one hell of a way to get potential investors’ attention: buy Google ads targeted at them. “Well, that’s one way to get a potential investor’s attention. I’m either impressed or creeped out,” Schachter notes.

Voyurl’s ad reads: Hi Joshua. We’re VOYURL. We Love Delicious. And We’d Love to Talk!

Well, it definitely worked. He saw the ad — though it’s not clear if he wants to talk after seeing it.

I, for one, am even more intrigued now. The service is giving me some spiel about how it’s all about open data. That’s nice, but what I find really interesting is the concept of people showing off every website they’re browsing at all times — in realtime. From their landing page:

A little creeped out? Thats cool. But dont worry, its ok to look. Besides, you can turn off voyurl at any time, for those, ahem, unmentionable sites. Plus, you can set your own filters. See, its not that scary.

Again, Blippy for web browsing.

Ads targeted at angel investors aside, they’re actually trying to raise money through Kickstarter. While would-be Facebook rival Diaspora raised some $200,000 that way, Voyurl only has about $1,300 so far. But they still have 75 days to go to reach their $10,000 goal — so help them out if this idea interests you.

Voyurl co-founder Adam Leibsohn managed to get profiled a couple years ago in the New York Times. Here’s what they wrote:

Adam Leibsohn, a 27-year-old communications strategist who makes roughly $60,000 a year and pays $1,650 a month for his own apartment in the East Village, says the trick to squeaking by in the city is to swear off impulse purchases and credit cards. He cooks for himself, pirates wireless Internet access and buys electronics from Craigslist or eBay. If he wants new clothes, he unloads old ones first at the Salvation Army, keeping the receipt for his taxes. Its kind of a spartan lifestyle, he says. I eat a lot of street meat for lunch.

Again, I keep getting more intrigued. Is Voyurl going to be the next big thing, or a haven for online predators? I can’t wait to find out.

As a sidenote, this is the second time Schachter has found oddly targeted ads around his name. The last time, it was Yahoo (the company he quit in 2008 after selling Delicious to them) who was trying to find new employees on Google off of searches for his name. Classy.

Schachter apparently loves Googling himself. As we all do. Soon, we’ll be able to prove it on Voyurl.

Apple’s Magic TrackPad has been given iFixit’s customary teardown - and they can confirm that magical unicorns are not part of the components list.

The teardown specialists discovered that Broadcom’s chips are the key components, running both the touch surface and the Bluetooth connectivity.

It is Broadcom chips that can be found performing similar roles in the Magic Mouse and iPad/iPhone from Apple.

No unicorns

“We didn’t find any magical unicorns inside, but we did uncover a plethora of components inside the Trackpad’s *very* thin profile,” said iFixit.

“Even though repairing the components might be infeasible, we’re still impressed by everything Apple’s engineers managed to stuff into the Trackpad.”

One point of note is the clever way that the button is pressed by users.

“The Magic Trackpad has a unique way of triggering the mouse button,” adds iFixit’s report.

” As you press down on the top surface of the pad, the two rubber feet near its front edge push on a plate attached to the chassis.

“The plate squeezes the electronic mouse button switch, producing the characteristic ‘click’.”

More pictures and details are at the iFixit website.

At current (self-reported) growth rate, the company should hit 2 billion downloads in about a year, if calculated on the back of a virtual envelope.

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the UK High Court has ruled that the sale, import and advertising of R4 games cards is now illegal in the UK, effectively putting to bed a loophole that allowed pirated games to run on a Nintendo DS and DSi.

A Nintendo statement said about the ruling: “Nintendo promotes and fosters game development and creativity, and strongly supports the game developers who legitimately create new and innovative applications.

“In the UK alone, there have been over 100,000 game copying devices seized since 2009.”

Legitimate dependence

The statement continued: “Nintendo initiates these actions not only on its own behalf, but also on behalf of over 1,400 video game development companies that depend on legitimate sales of games for their survival.”

The move comes after the Dutch courts penalised 11 retailers for selling R4 cartridges and Germany managed to prosecute a further 20 people for supplying R4 cartridges.

It seems that homebrew DS gaming is now definitely off the menu, which will come to relief for many a games dev.