Review of the Sony Ericsson Vivaz
The Sony Ericsson Vivaz is Sony Ericsson's first attempt at 720p HD video capture in a mobile phone. Top of the camera phone pile with their illustrious Cybershot range and, more recently, the 12 Megapixel Satio, Sony Ericsson now plan to extend their expertise to video recording. The Vivaz, like so many other Sony Ericsson phones before it, started life with the rather unusual codename Kurara. As the Kurara, the phone was seen in various leaks and sneak previews so by the time the phone was officially unveiled as the Vivaz we already felt we knew all there was to know about the phone before we'd even seen it in the flesh. We were very wrong though, as once you've held the phone, you realise that the design and build quality of the Vivaz is one of its strongest features.
Employing Sony Ericsson's new 'Human Curvature' design philosophy, the Vivaz is itching to be picked up and played with. The subtly curved back fits snugly into your hand whilst the curved top and bottom give the phone a nice symmetrical look. On either side we find a bit of flair in the shape of deep blue strips that run the length of the phone whilst the physical keys are made of premium plastics that compliment the smooth lines well. On the reverse, the large round camera lens sits in between a Sony Ericsson logo and the two most important letters in the Vivaz's alphabet; H and D (more on this later). The phone is also incredibly light weight at a mere 97 g. To put that into perspective, the iPhone 3GS weighs a whopping 135 g and the Satio (Sony Ericsson's 12MP camera phone) comes in at a hefty 126 g so the Vivaz is definitely a feather weight in comparison. The dimensions of the Vivaz are similarly svelte at 107 mm long and 12.5 mm thick.
The front of the phone is dominated by the touchscreen display which does well to use most of the real estate on offer. Above the display, we find the earpiece and below is a curved strip of three hardware keys; call answer, end and menu. On the top of the phone we find the power button and on the right side, from top to bottom you've got a volume/ zoom rocker, dedicated video key and camera key. On the opposite side sits a Micro USB port which is used for both data connectivity and charging the phone and puzzlingly a 3.5 mm audio jack. This is our only gripe with the design of the Vivaz. Whilst it's good that Sony Ericsson have seen sense and added a 3.5 mm audio jack (rather than their own proprietary port), it seems an odd choice to put it on the side where the headphones will undoubtedly stick out in an awkward fashion. This is fine when the phone's in your hand but can prove troublesome when in a pocket. This is a minor blip in what is otherwise a great looking, incredibly well designed phone that boasts a premium look and feel through.
The Vivaz boasts a 3.2 inch resistive touchscreen capable of displaying 16 Million colours on screen. Visually the display on the Vivaz is excellent with bright vivid colours and sharp textures making the phone incredibly easy to use. This is also the case when using the phone outside as the Vivaz doesn't seem to suffer at all in direct sunlight. Watching video, browsing the web and the phone's many menus is a real feast for the eyes. The touchscreen also includes an accelerometer that not only handles rotating the screen in certain applications but also boasts intuitive features such as turn to mute calls and alarms. Usability of the touchscreen is competent though it does seem a shame that Sony Ericsson opted for a resistive unit rather than a capacitive touchscreen. Opting for the former rules out multi-touch which can be used for features such as pinch-to-zoom.
Despite the disadvantages, using a resistive touchscreen does have its advantages most notably in the fact that the Vivaz can be used with a stylus. Though the phone doesn't incorporate one in the actual design, the retail box does include a stylus which can be attached to the bottom of the phone with a lanyard. Using a stylus in areas such as the web browser provides added accuracy so tapping on small icons and links is a possibility that simply wouldn't be available in a capacitive touchscreen. The touchscreen experience on the Vivaz is comparable to that found on the Satio or one of Nokia's latest touchscreen offerings such as the N97 Mini; competent without hitting the heights of capacitive touchscreen phones such as the iPhone or HTC HD2.
Sony Ericsson are clearly very excited about the camera on the Vivaz. It is, after all, the company's first phone to capture video in 720p HD and accordingly, the Vivaz has been given a dedicated video key. One press of the video button will automatically launch the video camera (though you can also fire it up from the main menu) and from here you're presented with the viewfinder and the familiar column of options on either side of the frame. Starting on the left we have Night mode and Microphone which can be toggled on or off, Focus which can be switched from Auto to Infinite, Exposure rating which can be altered to various values and lastly an Auto mode which does exactly what it says on the tin, switching the phone to Sony Ericsson's own pre-defined settings. On the right, we have three non-selectable icons which remind you of which settings you have in place (where videos are being saved to, video size and a video camera icon reminding you you're recording video). Next to this is the exit key and below this is a quick play icon and a more settings button where you can set a timer, switch the video size, turn on the video light, alter the white balance and add effects (Negative, Sepia etc.).
Once you've got the camera settings to your liking, it's simply a case of hitting the video button again to start recording. When set to 720p, video capture on the Vivaz is nothing short of stunning. Captured videos are smooth and free from choppy transitions, even when capturing moving objects. Video looks great on the phone's 3.2 inch display but all the more impressive when using the TV-Out feature; plug your Vivaz into your TV and watch back video clips worthy of a dedicated video camera. Sound quality is equally high making the whole playback experience a joy.
For most, selecting Auto for the camera settings will more than suffice but for those who love to tinker, you really can get some great results out of the Vivaz. The feature that you might have heard mentioned in relation to the Vivaz's HD video capture is continuous auto focus. Selecting auto will simply set the lens in a fixed focus which is perfect for shooting video on stationary or slow moving objects. If however you're filming a moving object, select continuous autofocus (infinite) and the phone will continue to re-focus on whatever is in shot on the viewfinder, ensuring your resulting captured videos are crystal clear. It's all very well and good putting 720p HD video in a phone but if it hasn't got a similarly spec'd lens to boot, the resulting clips will suffer. The Vivaz then, with the added bonus of continuous autofocus, performs admirably and is hands down the best video camera-phone hybrid we've ever seen.
Once you've recorded a clip and saved it (preferably to the memory card as 720p HD videos aren't small), it will automatically be added to your gallery. From here you can send via MMS (though good luck sending 720p HD clips as they'll be far too large), Bluetooth or send to the web by posting on YouTube. To do this you'll need to have a YouTube account set up (which is free and takes a matter of minutes) but once you've done this you're just a few short taps away from posting your masterpiece online. Viewing your videos on the phone itself is nice as the video player app is stylish and easy to use. The only drawback to the whole video experience on the Vivaz is that there's no way to edit your videos. There's no cropping feature as seen on the iPhone 3GS or Palm Pre and no option to add or remove audio once a clip has been recorded. A minor gripe, and something that could easily be remedied by a software update in the future.
On to the still camera and Sony Ericsson deliver excellent performance without springing too many surprises. The Vivaz boasts an 8.1 Megapixel camera that is bolstered by the likes of Smile and Face detection, an image stabiliser, autofocus and geo-tagging. The resulting photos are of excellent quality with little in the way of noise and bright, but more importantly, natural colours captured. The layout of the camera interface is a carbon copy of that found in the video app with the left side housing different scene, shot, focus and exposure settings as well as an auto mode for quick point and shoot photography. The right side again shows your current settings, a an exit and gallery icon and a more settings button that lets you play around with white balance, activate the image stabiliser and change image size.
The camera on the Vivaz is one of the best 8 Megapixel camera's we've used on a mobile phone, both in usability and the resulting images. There's also options a plenty once you've captured that precious moment with the ability to upload, geo-tag, send, edit, set as a wallpaper or assign to a contact and much more. The only slight let down on the camera front becomes noticeable when taking photo's in low light conditions. To compliment the HD Video camera, Sony Ericsson have included an LED Flash instead of the more powerful Xenon flash (LED can be used as a video light, Xenon can't). Whilst this is great news for capturing video at night, it leads to some disappointing results when trying to take a photo. We've seen phones include both an LED and a Xenon Flash before (or at least include a dual –LED flash) so this shouldn't have been beyond the realms of possibility with the Vivaz.
Sony Ericsson have dabbled with Symbian devices in the past, stretching way back to the P-Series which used Symbian UIQ. The current range however relies on Symbian S60 5th edition which is currently doing the rounds in the Sony Ericsson Satio and a number of touchscreen Nokia phones. Powering up the Vivaz for the first time will present users with a home screen that is characterised by two blocks of icons; one at the top and one at the bottom of the screen. At the bottom is a large box that occupies the bottom third of the screen. Within it you'll find four shortcut icons; one to bring up the dialler, a multimedia shortcut, messaging and a search tool which lets you search on the phone or online. Above these icons are your current profile (Silent, Meeting etc.), the time and date and your network provider. In the top right corner of the box is an arrow to maximise the box, revealing a music shortcut key. The Vivaz is of course a capable smartphone, multitasking with aplomb, so playing music in the background is a piece of cake with the track info and music player buttons added to the box at the bottom of the screen.
Between the Box at the bottom of the screen and the tabs at the top sits a blank space populated only by a stylish background that swirls and re-orientates itself depending on how you hold the phone. On first inspection this appears to be wasted space but it's actually the key to navigating the tabs. Swiping from left to right will allow you to flick between one of the five tabs at the top of the screen. Of the five tabs, the middle tab represents the home screen itself (complete with the shortcut box at the bottom of the display). On the home screen tab you can tap on the empty area to hide the shortcut box at the bottom. To call it back up you need to, rather oddly, press the call end button. A slight design quirk but you'll get used to it in no time.
Back to the tabs, the pre-set tabs on our Vivaz were, from left to right, favourite contacts, Twitter, the home screen tab, a quick view of your media player and lastly yet another shortcut area. This shortcut area hosts up to 8 shortcuts which are all user customisable. The shortcuts can be populated with pretty much anything on the phone, from Bluetooth to the pre-installed GPS software. Customising is a fairly simple affair; clicking on the shortcuts tab with reveal a settings icon and tapping on this will reveal the numbered shortcuts 1 through 8 and the applications currently occupying them. Tap on the shortcut you wish to change, choose the new shortcut and it will be changed for you.
The combination of tabs, shortcuts within one of the tabs and the shortcut box at the bottom of the screen work well. At first they can be a little daunting but once you're familiar with the layout, you should find yourself navigating like a pro. There literally are so many ways to get to a feature or application that each user will use a method that suits them best. If this is Symbian's take on Android, we like it and would love to see Nokia implementing this in their own Symbian phones. Away from the tabs and shortcuts on the home screen, there is of course a traditional menu that can be accessed by the middle hardware button. Once you've opened up the main menu, any Nokia user of the past few years will be instantly at home with the interface. Users are presented with 12 icons (that can be organised to prioritise most frequently used at the top of the screen) for areas such as messaging, media and so on. Selecting the required icon will take you into that folder and from there you can get deeper and deeper into the menus. Symbian has often been criticised for an overly complicated (and not particularly intuitive user interface) but the Vivaz seems to strike the right balance. The tabbed/ shortcut home screen provides quick and easy access to your most frequently used areas whilst the main menu, whilst not particularly pretty to look at or fun to navigate, is easy to use.
The Sony Ericsson Vivaz is supported by Sony Ericsson's app store, known as PlayNow. Hitting the PlayNow icon in the main menu will open a web page to take you to the store. Here you can search for specific apps, sort by type (games, apps, music etc.) and check out the latest and most popular additions. There are a good range of apps on offer and the fact that Sony Ericsson include music make this feel more like Apple's iTunes store than the app only experience you get with the Android Market. There is one minor drawback though; if you're after free apps you're not exactly spoilt for choice. Music tracks come in at £1 per track, games average around the £5 mark and even useless apps that would cost you nothing on an iPhone or Android phone will be chargeable on the Vivaz. There are some free apps on offer, good ones at that such as Spotify, but we definitely need more of these to compete with the big names in the app world.
The phone does also include some pre-installed apps such as Facebook, YouTube, the aforementioned Twitter client and a SatNav application called Wisepilot. Wisepilot offers users features such as route planning and general mapping and can also be upgraded to full voice guided navigation on a subscription basis. YouTube is a fairly straight forward app that takes you to a web portal of the popular video sharing site. A search bar lets you find exactly what you're looking for whilst top rated, most viewed and latest tabs also ease navigation. Click on a video and it nicely zooms to full screen and loads almost instantly. The Facebook app is equally impressive letting you check profiles, upload photos and comment on friends photos. Navigation is quick and easy and the overall user interface is very similar to that found on the full site.
Symbian on the Vivaz is impressive. The user interface is clean and easy to navigate and there are endless customisation options thanks to tabs and shortcuts on the home screen. If you're new to Symbian you should pick it up fairly quickly and find yourself navigating like a pro. On the apps front, the preinstalled applications on offer are great and the app store is nicely populated, it would just be good to see more free apps coming through. Time will tell how the app community develops but the onus is on Sony Ericsson to make it work.
The web browser on the Vivaz is a bit of a mixed bag. Selecting the web browser application in the main menu prompts you with a small pop-up asking you whether you want to use Wi-Fi or a data connection. This is fine for the first time you use the web browser but gets annoying after the 10th time of asking. Unfortunately, the Vivaz won’t remember your selection and so will present you with this message every time you try to take the Vivaz online. This is admittedly a great idea for those users who are on pay as you go, on a budget or using the phone abroad. If however you're using your Vivaz with an unlimited data bundle it does become slightly irksome after a while.
This is a minor gripe though and getting past it is just a case of a couple of taps to get past the message. On the plus side, switching between Wi-Fi and 3G is very easy thanks to this message. Once you've opened the web browser, you're taken to a Sony Ericsson portal from which you can choose to search on Google, enter a specific URL and access a selection of different shortcuts. The web browser on the Vivaz is incredibly simple to use. At the bottom we find the main icons you'll be using such as the zoom icon to zoom in specific parts of the page and the excellent 'find' function which lets you locate specific parts of a web page. This is especially handy when trying to find a certain part of a text heavy page. To type in a new URL, hit the globe icon in the middle and the Vivaz will display the on-screen keyboard for you to punch in your desired location. Pages load fairly quickly and do an excellent job of rendering texts and images.
The addition of dedicated apps for social networking sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter also mean that there is more than one way to access your favourite sites. Theses dedicated apps are tailor made for their corresponding web site and it really does show when using them. One drawback is that there is no Flash support so sites with flash content will load up the all too familiar building block logo telling you to download flash player (which obviously you can't). Aside from this, browsing the web on the Vivaz is an enjoyable all round experience.
The music player on the Vivaz is fairly straight forward and will be instantly recognisable to those who've used a recent Walkman phone. Plug your Vivaz into a PC or laptop and it will appear on your desktop as a mass storage device. From here, it's just a case of dragging and dropping your desired tracks from your desktop to the phone and away you go. Firing up the music player in the main menu presents users with a very stylish monochrome list (ala the PS3/ PSP user interface) and lets you sort through your music by artist, album, genre and playlist. Once you've selected a track to play, the music player interface will appear on screen and is incredibly user friendly. At the top of the screen the phone lists the artist, album and track name info. Beneath this you get album art (if you've uploaded any that is) and below this you'll find the buttons to pause and skip backwards and forwards, a timer telling you how far through the track you are, volume and more options (such as graphical equalisers).
There is also a back button and you may find this a bit odd but this is actually one of the best features of the music player. You see, hitting the back button won't actually quit out of the music player but instead minimise it and take you back to the home screen. Your track will continue to play in the back ground and a miniaturised version of the multimedia player is added to the bottom of the home screen in the shortcut box. This works similarly to Windows Media player on your desktop when minimised; you still have full functionality of the music player (the ability to pause, skip etc.) only it's not occupying the entire screen and allows you to explore other areas of the phone. This isn't new to mobile phones but the way the Vivaz implements this musical multi-tasking is what really wins us over.
Video is handled in an equally impressive fashion. In addition to the excellent YouTube app, videos that you've downloaded elsewhere (such as full movies from Sony Ericsson's PlayNow store) or recorded with the 720p HD video record feature can be played back on the phone. The video player is clean and easy to use playing your videos in full on the vivid 3.2 inch screen. Tapping on the screen will bring up a host of semi transparent icons such as the timer which again tells you how far through your video clip you are and volume on the right. These disappear after a few seconds taking you back to the main event. Watching videos is a joy and you could quite happily watch a full length movie and the addition of a 3.5 mm audio jack and the superb sound quality really makes this a polished all round viewing experience.
From our time with the Sony Ericsson Vivaz we were highly impressed with what this smartphone/ multimedia hybrid has to offer. The stand out feature is undoubtedly the incredible 720p HD video capture. We've seen and used it before on the Samsung i8910 HD but it's a much more refined experience on the Sony Ericsson. The addition of features such as continuous auto focus and the ease with which videos can be posted to YouTube puts the Vivaz in another league altogether. Combine this with an excellent 8.1 Megapixel camera and Sony Ericsson have definitely got both bases covered.
Elsewhere, the Symbian operating system has come along nicely since we last used it in the Satio. Gone are the bugs and in come even more customisation options and a host of great pre-installed apps such as Facebook and Twitter. The third party app support is a cause for concern with not much on offer at present (and with most of what is available coming at a price) but if Sony Ericsson and the Symbian community can entice more and more developers this could all change. On the hardware front, the touchscreen does take a little getting used to and it is a shame that Sony Ericsson didn't opt for a capacitive display as it rules out the likes of pinch-to-zoom. But, the ability to use a stylus and support handwriting recognition do go some way to making up for this and for general navigation through web pages and menus, the Vivaz is more than up to the task.
Finally, the design of the phone is stunning, fitting comfortably in your hand and with enough style and subtle flair that you'll want to show it off to friends. Build quality is equally impressive, despite the fact that Sony Ericsson have opted for plastics (albeit high quality plastics) in favour of metal. The look and feel of the phone is spot on; the Vivaz is easily one of the best looking phone's we've ever had the pleasure of using and thankfully these looks are backed up by a good operating system and some excellent features summed up by the 720p HD video capture.
Dan, Mobiles.co.uk
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