I'm curious if anyone else has beard new of this:
[Long story.]

Just one week ago I purchased a new Cingular family plan in
Northern CA including two z520a phones (and one unrelated
model).  The phones have mostly worked, but twice mine has
locked up in a weird way.  The first time I didn't investigate
carefully (since I had been experimenting with bluetooth with my PC)
but today it happened again and I took the time to make a techno-
dweebhead analysis.  (I was at the time coping with two emergencies,
both of which needed phone communications, and I was hiking in the
hills with no landlines close by.)

The symptom is that although the phone is set to vibrate _and_ ring,
the phone only vibrates for incoming calls.  (This caused me to miss
a couple calls during the emergencies.)  After establishing that the
phone was still set to ring, I tried to play the file currently set as
the ring tone, a midi file.  The phone responded that the file could
not be played, with no further explanation, and similarly for several
other files, including the annoying, undeletable tasteless technopop
music files files the programmers of this phone thought reasonable to
force a classical musician to carry around in his pocket.

I decided the phone's OS had wedged itself, so powered off to reboot
it.  The phone absolutely refused to power back on.  Urgently needing
the phone, I was finally able to reset it by removing the battery for
30 seconds and then restarting.

So, later today (a Sunday of a holiday weekend) I returned to the
Cingular company store and sales agent that sold me the phone.  He
said that just that morning Cingular had withdrawn the z520a because
the phone was defective.  Indeed, the phone had been removed from the
wall display.  Unfortunately, since the change was so recent, he did
not know what Cingular would do to replace the phone it its lineup.
Another employee thought they would reissue it (presumably the problem
is programming, so existing units could be reflashed) but the only
thing he could do immediately was to offer me an exchange to a
different model of phone.  I declined, wanting to review the
possibilities before acting.

Later I tried Cingular customer service at 611.  The support person
(who genuinely seemed to be sited in the USA_ denied that there was
any news on the z520a.  I suggested that he might not have received the
news yet, since it was very recent, but he denied this with a rather
surly tone, and recited about three times all my options to exchange
the phone for the same model, or another model.  He refused my request
to have Cingular contact me in a few days after the matter could be
researched, so I told him to log the problem and that _I_ would contact
them again in a few days.

Later in the day I checked the Cingular web site, specifically, the
selection of offered phones.  The z520a is no longer listed.

So I'm eager to learn any breaking news on the z520a at Cingular.
Meanwhile, the possibility grows that I will return to my previous
carrier.