Sony Ericsson Vivaz Review

Sony Ericsson has been at the forefront of the move to squeeze as many pixels as possible into a mobile phone camera. Now the company has moved on and the Vivaz offers an 8 megapixel camera plus 720p video shooting.

The Vivaz is nicely slimline at 107mm x 52mm x 12.5mm and light too at 97g. The light weight comes at a price, though. The plastic chassis is not super-protective and the backplate is particularly flimsy. The curved top and bottom edges are eye-catching, and the black and sliver livery of our review sample pleasing enough if lacking innovation. The blue hue to the side edges doesn’t do much for us, though.

There are three buttons beneath the screen – Call, End and a menu button. These are long and thin, and we found them fiddly. The handset’s responsiveness to pressing these buttons, and, incidentally, to the resistive touch screen, was a little slower than we’d like too.

These factors combine to make using the Vivaz less intuitive than many other smartphones. You get a stylus that hangs from the handset which you can use instead of a finger to prod at the screen if you feel the need.

The screen is a decent size at 3.2 inches, and its pixel count at 360 x 640 is on the higher side. It is, as we usually find with Sony Ericsson screens, beautifully sharp and bright. It turns between wide and tall formats as you swivel the handset in your palm, though this doesn’t always happen as quickly as we’d like.

The big questions with the Vivaz are, of course, how good the 720p video recording is and whether you actually want it on a phone in the first place. To the second question, we aren’t convinced it has a place on a phone any more than we are convinced that anything above 8 megapxels is desirable for a handset stills camera.

To the first, video quality is good and perfectly sharable, although a general lack of features means it won’t be replacing your dedicated camcorder any time soon. An LED light helps out with indoor stuff – though you have to be pretty near the subject for it to have much effect. Why, on this handset of all handsets, Sony Ericsson didn’t choose Xenon we aren’t sure.

Sony Ericsson provides an 8GB microSD card on which to store your photos, video and any other media. It sits under the backplate and is easily hotswappable.

Music playback is catered for and here Sony Ericsson makes a mistake – but not the one you might be thinking of. The headset slot is not Sony Ericsson proprietary but 3.5mm, which is a plus. But it is mounted right at the top of the left edge, so that the connector snags when the headphones are in place and the phone is in your pocket. Those curved edges make top-mounting the headset connector impossible, and in doing so they negatively affect usability.

The Vivaz runs on S60 5th edition. We’ve never liked its confusion between double and single tapping, and it feels clunky, out of step and old fashioned even though Sony Ericsson has tweaked it visually. There are five home screens which out of the box show contacts, a Twitter feed, gallery, an empty space and applications shortcuts.

There is also a little shortcuts bar you can call up by pressing the menu key which gives you quick access to the dialler, multimedia, music and more. Sony Ericsson has clearly tried to tweak S60, but customisation options pale into insignificance when compared to the likes of Android.

There’s GPS and Wi-Fi, and the Vivaz supports HSDPA and has a TV-out facility. It supports Exchange Activesync as well as ordinary mobile email. For all that, we were a little underwhelmed by the Vivaz. HD video recording is its only real noteworthy point.

Price: £350 SIM-free
Web: www.sonyericsson.com

Essential Verdict
Performance: 7/10
Design: 7/10
Features: 8/10
Value for Money: 7/10
Overall score: 7/10

Written by Sandra Vogel. Originally published in Smartphone Essentials magazine.

Popularity: 2% [?]