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The stylish new Vivaz was only recently launched here in India. It’s designed to offer mobile camera buffs a value for their money, at least that’s what Sony Ericsson says. The Vivaz has been a much awaited handset but before you go around whipping out your wallet, here’s a closer look at the handset. It should help you make up your mind if this is the right high end camera phone for you. Form Factor The Human Curvature design is by far an excellent way for a handset to be designed. The Subtle curve gives the Vivaz that feel good factor you look for when holding a handset. The resistive 3.2-inch display was a bad idea. That eye-brow pencil styled stylus just dangles from the top of the handset from its tether making it quite an annoyance. It has a 3.5mm handsfree socket on one side and a micro USB port just underneath that. On the other side are the volume/zoom keys followed by two separate keys to activate the Video camera and the still. This just makes it quite easy and you can quickly start up either without worrying. A hot swap microSD card slot for the bundled 8GB card is just under the rear panel.  While it’s well crafted, lightweight and looks good in your hand, the fact that it’s made completely of plastic with little or a negligible amount of metal incorporated makes it feel a bit cheap. Nevertheless it does have a chic look too it with its dark blue sides and all black coat, but I still remain firm about it being a little bit feminine. The plastic rear panel, aside from being a superb finger print magnet will also get easily scratched if you’re constantly removing it from and placing it into your pocket.  Features and Performance Interface Running on a 720 MHz CPU, most of the Vivaz’s functions aren’t too slow. Scrolling through pictures and opening a few features happens quite quickly enough. However, a certain amount of lag is evident when it comes to accelerometer rotating the displays. There were also a few times when the handset simply hung when I hit the ‘back’ button in some applications. Another issue was that I heard the handset ring for at least 4 seconds before the screen would flash with the caller’s name. I’m not sure if this was a deliberate setting, but I don’t like it. The button on the top of the screen doubles up as a power key and screen lock. What was annoying was when pressed it would shoot up a list of menus that included 'Lock Screen' and the various profiles and a shut off option, if your hand slips you’ll end up shutting off the handset instead of locking the screen. It would have made more sense just having a separate screen lock switch. A few gesture based controls like turning the handset over to silence incoming calls are also present.  The Vivaz uses a Symbian Series 60, 5th edition UI which has its share of flaws. The UI is surprisingly responsive and quite finger friendly though. The desktop Standby modes include the standard S60 touchscreen options and one created just for Sony Ericsson handsets. A shortcut media bar with access to other shortcuts, including access to music you may be currently playing, is present at the bottom of the screen.  The full screen QWERTY keypad makes typing quite simple. If that doesn’t do it for you there’s a smaller one more conducive to use with a stylus. Of course you can stick to the plain old alphanumeric mode if you like. Unfortunately there’s no mode to switch automatically to the full QWERTY keypad in landscape from the other options. Handwriting recognition is also another option. Media The handset’s music player sadly doesn’t measure up to most of the other S60 devices out there in the world. Like the Satio that was launched months ago bearing the same UI, Sony Ericsson has clearly not thought it necessary enough to include EQ presets to help boost the audio level. As is, the volume is dreadfully low and I had to push the earphones into my ears and hold them there just to make out the lyrics of a song. For some strange reason the Vivaz, didn’t seem to work with my other set of earphones. They refused to be ‘accepted’ and audio would only stream out of the speakerphone. Thankfully the speakerphone isn’t too loud either or my fellow commuters would have had issues with that. On the plus side, the quality of audio, when I could hear it, was quite good. The FM radio worked out quite well with decent reception in most places.  Irrespective of the fact that this camera can record videos in a 720p format, it doesn’t support videos of a DivX or XviD variety. Not that that's a problem, but it would have helped boost the overall rating. iPhone sized MPEG4 videos play very well and so do standard 3GP files. It also supports TV Out. A couple of 3D games have been included and help wile away those boring commutes. |
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