Sanyo Zio Review

by PrepaidWirelessGuy
(Orange County, CA)

After a month of good solid usage, I've posted my Sanyo Zio review. Although the Zio smartphone is available on multiple carriers, i-wireless (a Sprint MVNO in partnership with Kroger) was kind enough to provide me with a test unit. I've posted my full review on a separate page (see below for the link); however, here you can find an executive summary of my experience.

- My first impressions of the Sanyo Zio were that it felt great in my hand, and had a great fit and finish. The curved screen makes swiping very fluid, though somewhat awkward if you want to use a screen protector.

- I liked the soft keys for navigation much better than physical keys found on other smartphones. It makes navigation really zippy.

- I found the trackball to be an extremely odd choice, and found myself never using it.

- The phone has an external LED message indicator, which I've noted was missing on other smartphones, which I consider to be a major design flaw. Sanyo was smart to include it here.

- The Zio from i-wireless ships with Android 2.1. Although it's not the latest and greatest Froyo OS (at the time of writing the review), it's a massive improvement over Android OS 1.6 that ships on the Cricket version of the Sanyo Zio.


- Although the screen is certainly not the best available, I found the screen quality to be perfectly nice to look at. Where the screen did fall short was on its responsiveness. I found that it often didn't register my touches, and became quite irritating to say the least.

- I found the general performance of this smartphone to be quite poor (i.e. slow!). For an entry level Android smartphone, priced properly (ex. $99), it would be perfectly acceptable. However, with prices ranging from $139-$199, and with other better performing smartphones available, I simply couldn't justify this performance.

- I note in my full Sanyo Zio review that this smartphone doesn't support pinch to zoom in the browser. I found this to be somewhat disappointing, and came to learn that this is not an i-wireless or Android limitation, but rather has something to do with the hardware itself.


Overall, I found myself really wanting to love it, and wanted to write a glowing Sanyo Zio review. However, despite the great look and feel, the speed performance, and poor screen responsiveness left me not being able to recommend this handset.


Feel free to read about another prepaid smartphone in this class in my LG Optimus Review, or click over to the full Zio Review: