Sony Ericsson today announced the Z525, a push-to-talk upgrade to the popular Sony Ericsson Z520. The Z525 is a stylish clamshell which works worldwide. The Z525 handset which also features Bluetooth, a VGA camera, as well as a host of messaging capabilities, will be sold in the US beginning in the second quarter 2006.

Push-to-talk is a fun and easy way to stay in touch as immediate contact is maintained. It's useful in many types of situations including connecting a small group such as colleagues working in various locations or friends and family in different places.

For the price segment, the Z525 is packed with useful and fun features. Bluetooth allows you to easily connect to a variety of headsets, car kits and other Bluetooth enabled devices. Like its popular predecessor, special lighting effects on the Z525 let you know who is calling. Blue lights around the rim light up in eight different patterns that sync with melodies to match individual callers. The VGA camera lets you save color pictures of your most frequent callers along with their contact details.

There is no memory card slot on the phone and the 16MB internal memory neither good for music listening. So unless you are really looking for an affordable, cheap phone, this phone is not for you.

Z525 Features at a glance:

• Internal display: 128 x 160 pixels, 65K colors, 1.8" TFT display
• External display: 80 x 101 pixels, 4K colors
• VGA camera with 4X digital zoom
• Video recording, streaming and playback
• Standard POP/IMAP4 E-mail
• MMS and SMS
• Push-to-talk
• Media Player (MP3/AAC support)
• Dedicated external speaker
• MusicDJ and VideoDJ
• MIDI, MPEG4, 3GPP
• 3D Gaming
• Java
• Video playback and streaming
• OMA DRM
• 40 tone polyphonic ringer
• 16 MB user memory
• Quad-band GSM/GPRS 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
• Bluetooth, USB support, WAP 2.0, Infrared (IrDA)

The Sony Ericsson Z525a is quad-band GSM/GPRS 850/900/1800/1900. It will be available in New Blue and starts shipping during Q2 2006.

More Z525 photos at next page