Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro review, Price, pictures, Details, model specifications
Modern always-on web-connected generation need so much equipment to get through the day it’s a small wonder they don’t have to lug tool bags around – the small wonder in this case is the Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro. It’s a full-featured smartphone with a QWERTY keyboard for great messaging and 720p video recording, all in an impressively compact body.
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The term “cameraphone” emerged soon after pictures taken with a mobile phone began to look less like impressionist paintings and more like actual photos. Today we’re at a point when 5MP are nothing to write home about.
So, this here pro is the lesser cameraphone of the Vivaz pair. And “camcorderphone” does sound clumsy. But if competing phones are any indication, 5MP stills and 720p video is quite an exciting combo.
Less attention grabbing, but no less useful is the hardware QWERTY keyboard. Sure, there are plenty of phones around with a full keyboard, but how many of them can match the Sony Ericsson Vivaz feature set?
To answer that, we need to know what those features are of course, so here’s the traditional list of pros and cons.
Key features
- 3.2″ 16M-color resistive touchscreen of 640 x 360 pixel resolution
- 5 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash, face and smile detection, geotagging and touch focus
- HD 720p video recording @ 24fps with continuous auto focus
- Symbian OS 9.4 S60 5th, topped with a custom-brewed homescreen and media menu
- 720 MHz CPU, PowerVR SGX dedicated graphics accelerator
- Quad-band GSM support
- 3G with HSDPA 10.2Mbps and HSUPA 2Mbps support
- Wi-Fi b/g; DLNA
- GPS with A-GPS support
- microSD card slot (up to 16GB, 8GB card in the box)
- Built-in accelerometer; Turn-to-mute
- TV out
- Wisepilot navigation software preinstalled (30 day trial)
- Four-row QWERTY keyboard
- Office document viewer
- Stereo FM Radio with RDS; TrackID
- microUSB and stereo Bluetooth v2.0
- Web browser with full Flash support
- Decent audio quality
Main disadvantages
- Camera downgraded from 8MP on the regular Vivaz
- No camera lens protection
- The S60 5th edition UI isn’t the best in usability
- No auto locking of the screen during a call
- No DivX or XviD support out-of-the-box
- No smart or voice dialing
- No secondary videocalling camera
The scales are swinging both ways. A point in favor of the Vivaz pro is the mature Symbian platform. It cannot hide its age and is struggling to catch up with the best in business. But it’s been around since the dawn of time (the time of smartphones that is), which makes it well supported and very reliable.
The QWERTY keyboard, the document viewer and the ActiveSync support are real must-haves for the business crowd. High-quality photos and videos may be a teenage thing but they can help be creative with a presentation too.
Another way to look at the Vivaz pro is as a great travel companion. Posting status updates on Twitter and Facebook is a breeze thanks to the keyboard and dedicated apps. And so is uploading 720p videos to YouTube. There’s even voice guided navigation included.
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Touch Symbian Sony Ericsson style
Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro runs the Symbian OS 5th edition – it’s the touch enabled Symbian that all Nokia touch smartphones use (aside from the Nokia N900 that is).
However, the 5th edition user interface is identical to the non-touch 3rd edition. And what was convenient to use with a D-pad, turned out less convenient for finger use. And while the Symbian Foundation scrambles to deliver Symbian^3, which should improve the touch experience, Sony Ericsson have refurbished the old OS.
In a nutshell, if you are familiar with the Satio, Vivaz pro won’t be a surprise. The changes are restricted to the homescreen, the gallery (Sony Ericsson have put on their excellent Walkman UI), and the camera.
The homescreen uses a tabbed interface but not like the “Vertical icon bar” often seen (though rarely used) in Nokia handsets. There are five tabs, which are in effect five alternative homescreen panes. You can assign a different function to every screen – favorite contacts, flow animation, camera album, shortcuts, static picture, Flash animation or the Twitter app.
Excellent messaging
The messaging menu is pretty much the same, though there are some Sony Ericsson touches here and there.
The Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro supports all common message types – SMS, MMS and email. They all share a common intuitive editor which by this point should be quite familiar.
Once you insert some multimedia content or an email address as recipient, the character counter is replaced by a data counter showing the size of your email.
Media center: Sony Ericsson knows the drill
The Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro Media center is a replica of what you usually find on the company’s feature phones (and Sony PlayStation, mind you) – an attractive and convenient way of accessing the media content on your phone.
Sony Ericsson used the tight Media layout just like in the Satio, and there are only the three essential shortcuts to make up the media main menu – Photo, Music and Video.
As you may’ve already guessed, the first one will lead you to the main gallery with all its various options available. The second give access to the Walkman player and all playlists. Finally, the third one will take you to all the video clips stored on the Vivaz pro.
Image gallery
The photo gallery is the same as in the Satio and the first Vivaz and definitely among the best we’ve seen: with great customization capabilities and features aplenty. Some of those options include: one-click access to the latest snapshot you’ve taken, timeline view for your images and tags.
Tags are a very helpful feature offering better ways to make albums – a photo can have multiple tags, which you can’t do with folders.
Viewing photos is fun with the Vivaz pro, especially when browsing images fullscreen. When you want to go to the next in line, it doesn’t simply pop up but instead slides in from left or right.
Walkman on Symbian really works
The Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro comes with the Walkman music player with all the implied features but not all the usual eye-candy. Much like the rest of the media menu, the accelerometer is used here for automatic rotation of the display. The accelerometer is a bit trigger happy, and frequently auto-rotation kicked in when it wasn’t supposed to.
Naturally, the music player also offers step-by-step filtering of the tracks you want to listen to. The “Now playing” screen is simple but offers all the needed controls and information. The tracks are controlled by comfortably large and thumbable on-screen keys at the bottom.
Video player plays HD, but not DivX/XviD
The video player on the Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro is nothing spectacular. Sure, it plays 720p videos but it’s limited in the codec department.
Lacking DivX/XviD support can be overcome by re-encoding the video you want to upload. For that you can use the MediaGo application that Sony Ericsson launched a while back. It’s not without its limitations, but it’s still a pretty sweet app.
You could of course buy a third-party video player that supports DivX/XviD.
Vivaz pro can snap some nice shots
The Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro packs a 5-megapixel camera and is capable of taking photos of up to 2592 x 1944 pixels. There’s also a LED flash, but it’s better suited as a video light.
The Vivaz pro camera interface is quite comfortable. The viewfinder usually occupies the center of the screen with two black bars around it. The camera UI buttons are over the bars, so it’s not big deal. You could switch to 16:9 mode but that drops the photo resolution down to 3MP.
On the left side of the viewfinder there are five shortcuts. Those cover Scenes, Shoot mode, Focus settings, Exposure compensation and Auto mode.
Image quality is nice
The Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro may have a 5MP camera rather than a 8MP one, but the images it produces are very pleasant.
The amount of captured detail is great – there’s a great balance between noise-reduction and sharpening and there’s no sign of the typical side effects of both. The resolved detail is great, even foliage – which usually gets an oil-painting look after the noise reduction – comes out quite well.
There’s one problem with the photos though – the contrast in all photos is low. The colors are accurate though.
Vivaz pro shoots HD video
We’ve reached the good stuff – the Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro captures 720p videos at 24 fps, joining the cool kids club.
Probably the best feature of the Vivaz pro is the continuous auto focus during video recording – it allows it to act just like a dedicated video camera. We have a video demo below that shows the feature in action.
The frame rate hovers around and just below 24fps – depending on the scene, and under close inspection that might become visible.
As far as the 24 vs. 30 frames per second – this is one of those rare cases where more isn’t better. All of us are used to seeing 24fps as “movie quality” and faster frame rates have a certain look that many rec recognize as “that cheap camcorder look”.
Despite having different image sensors, the videos from the Vivaz and Vivaz pro are almost a match in video quality.
The quality of the Sony Ericsson Vivaz videos is nice with reasonably well-resolved detail and accurate colors. The contrast is low here too, like the still camera, but the sharpening is excessive, which sometimes leads to visible artifacts
We’re also pleased to report that the rolling shutter effect that the first Vivaz suffered from has been greatly reduced.
Here’s a couple of other Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro camera video samples:
And a demo of the continuous auto-focus feature in action:
Connectivity is full-suite
The Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro has quite a few connectivity options. Starting with GSM connectivity, there’s quad-band GSM/EDGE for 2G networks and two-band (or three-band in the Americas) 3G, which gets a bump in speed from the 10.2Mbps HSDPA and 2Mbps HSPA.
Moving on to local connectivity, there’s Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP and Wi-Fi b/g with DLNA and microUSB and TV out for the wired connectivity.
An 8GB microSD card comes in the box, but you can plug in a 16GB card if you have one. Mass Storage mode is supported, so you don’t even need a PC suite installed to browse the files on the card.
The web browser is good at rendering, bad at usability
Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro uses the S60 5th edition browser and starts up with the typical Sony Ericsson homepage.
Browsing has quite a few usability issues though. The kinetic scrolling for one – it doesn’t have enough momentum and stops way too abruptly. The tap-to-zoom feature switches between three levels of zoom: 30%, 100% and 200%. Strangely, it was a little hard to trigger, so you are better off using the zoom bar.
You can view a page fullscreen, which gets the controls out of the way, and Overview, which shows fits the page on the screen and lets you pick which zone to zoom back to. While the browser has support for multiple pages opened at the same time, this only works for popups – you can’t open a new tab manually and punch in a new web address.
Symbian-grade organizer
The S60 organizer didn’t get tweaked that much for the new OS beyond basic touch optimization, but this time you will be glad to have Copy/Paste in the menu options.
The calendar has four different view modes – monthly, weekly, daily and to-do, which allows you to check up all your pending tasks regardless of their date. There are the same four types of events available for setting up as on S60 3rd edition – Meeting, Memo, Anniversary and To-do.
Each event has unique fields of its own, and some of them allow an alarm to be activated at a preset time to act as a reminder.
Applications unusually few
The preinstalled applications on the Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro include RoadSync, SMS Preview and Facebook. There’s also dedicated voice-guided navigation software, which we’ll cover later on.
The DataViz RoadSync is among the most useful preinstalled applications if you plan to use your Vivaz in a corporate environment. In essence, it’s an ActiveSync client, which provides secure, wireless and direct push synchronization of corporate e-mail, calendar, contacts, tasks and attachments. You don’t have to be a white-collar to use that. You may just as well sync your phone to the Google cloud service – contacts, email and calendar.
Wisepilot to guide your way
The Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro features a built-in GPS receiver. Its sensitivity is nothing spectacular – it managed to get a lock from a cold start in a couple of minutes.
The Vivaz pro is equipped with the Wisepilot navigation software on a 30 day trial. It offers all the features you’d expect in a proper SatNav solution. There’s voice-guided walk and drive navigation, maps are courtesy of NAVTEQ, there’s 3D view of the maps, extensive route-planning settings, speed camera alerts, POI and weather.
