Sony Ericsson Vivaz review
By Richard Lai 
posted April 6th 2010 4:31PM
posted April 6th 2010 4:31PM
Hardware
We have mixed feelings about the Vivaz's appearance -- on one hand the 'human curvature' approach (as applied on the Xperia X10, we've been told) is a fresh change to Sony Ericsson's usual rectangular form factor, but at the same time this does come with a bloated look that some may or may not fancy. The shiny, hollow-sounding plastic chassis is a bit of a downer -- it's the only feature that has turned the Vivaz's lightness (at 3.42 ounces) into a drawback, as the combination inevitably brings the illusion that this £300 / $448 device (as offered by 3 UK) is a budget phone instead. Another niggle is that the back cover's proven to be quite a challenge to rip open, so mind your fingernails. So much for a natural grip, eh?
There's no AMOLED magic on the 3.2-inch display, but at 640 x 360, this crisp resolution (229 dpi) will help you check that your lens is in focus while snapping and filming -- not to mention the sharp visual multimedia playback you'll get as well. We did, however, notice that our screen had a slight yellow tint, and we haven't been able to confirm whether this applies to all the Vivaz units. Moving on to a more touchy subject: this phone uses a resistive touchscreen (as the pointy stylus above suggests), but we were almost fooled by its unusual hardness as conventional ones tend to be spongy, so at least it feels good to the touch. We won't go into the whole capacitive versus resistive debate again, but we will say this: resistive is fine only if the user interface is designed in such a way that a stylus is not needed; in other words, the virtual keys need to be finger-friendly, and that pages can be scrolled without the sole reliance on narrow scroll bars. We'll check on this later.
Camera
Those who are familiar with the Satio should notice this similar camera interface on the Vivaz. You get an identical set of "Scenes" (auto, portrait, landscape, twilight landscape, sports, document, twilight portrait, beach/snow) and "Shoot mode" (normal, panorama, smile detection, touch capture) but without "Bestpic" -- a tool that lets you take a sequence of photos and then pick out the best shot to keep. "Exposure" and "Auto mode" are still there, but the button for disabling the
The camera app can be launched by holding down either camera buttons (thus launching the corresponding capture mode), even when the phone's locked. Some may see this as a handy feature for quickly capturing short-lived comical moments, but this also brings the risk of accidentally turning on the camera when it's in your pocket (which has happened to us a few times).
Once you're in, you can switch between three aspect ratios (4:3 at 8 megapixels, 3:2 at 7 megapixels, 16:9 at 6 megapixels) and smaller sizes for still shots, whereas in video mode you can choose either 720p or 640 x 480. Picture quality is pretty decent overall -- great colors and sharpness for shots taken in the daylight, albeit with fairly noticeable artifacting in the blue sky; at night, we've had the occasional struggle with the focusing, but the Vivaz's impressive noise reduction is worth the multiple attempts for each shot.
Like many compact cameras these days, the Vivaz also offers some fun camera modes as seen on the Satio. We started off with the smile detection mode -- once chosen, you need to press on the shutter button to activate the detection, and it responded best with a bit of teeth. Next up is the panorama mode -- it relies on the accelerometer to guide you through the three-stage shoot, and it worked brilliantly as long as our camera was pointing straight ahead and level for all three shots. Lastly, touch capture was equally impressive and pretty handy for close-up shots. If you don't mind sacrificing a bit more battery juice, you can also enable geotagging for your photos.
There aren't as many fancy toys to play with in video capture mode, but the YouTube uploader and the overall video performance alone are enough to keep us satisfied. Again, picture quality is great during both day and night, although the latter does suffer from some color noise. Audio's good, especially with picking up nearby voices even in a noisy environment, but it won't do much good if you're in the wind. Most importantly, the continuous auto-focusing -- a first on a 720p-recording phone -- worked well for us. You can see it all for yourself in the demo video below (and remember to turn on HD playback).
Software
Earlier we mentioned how the resistive touchscreen is still acceptable as long as its interface accommodates the finger well, as in avoiding the stylus wherever possible. Sadly, the Vivaz isn't entirely finger-friendly -- the full landscape QWERTY keyboard isn't available in all apps, and some menus are only scrollable using the thin vertical bar on the right. This alone isn't as much of an annoyance as the inconsistency across the menus and apps, so hopefully Sony Ericsson will get this fixed before users go grey.
The homescreen consists of five tabbed panels in this default order: favorite contacts, Twitter, "Flow" (some cool accelerometer-based wavy animation that doesn't seem to do much else), camera gallery and shortcuts. You can change the panel type by holding down its tab, thus getting the above list plus two more options: aquarium and album. On each panel you can summon the same shortcut box by clicking on the hang-up button, then you'll have quick access to the dialer, media gallery, messages and search, plus the music playback buttons (accompanied by album artwork) if you have some tunes playing in the background.
The Twitter panel is essentially a simple Flash-powered app. How do we know? It says so in the many memory-related error messages we've seen, and the only way to relaunch the crashed app is by restarting the phone. On top of the slightly laggy scrolling, it's also disappointing to see the full QWERTY keyboard missing for Twitter -- we've had to rely on the little stylus to log in (for every boot, that is, as it didn't store our credentials) and compose tweets. The lack of reply and direct message filters is a frustration, too, but you can always hit the Twitter website from the app for your regular Twitter features and the full keyboard. On a more positive note, the minimalistic camera gallery panel is pretty slick -- it's essentially a vertical-scrolling, one-at-a-time photo / video viewer, so from afar the panel appears to be a wallpaper showing the latest picture / video still from the camera. Clicking on the image will launch the full media gallery.
The Twitter panel is essentially a simple Flash-powered app. How do we know? It says so in the many memory-related error messages we've seen, and the only way to relaunch the crashed app is by restarting the phone. On top of the slightly laggy scrolling, it's also disappointing to see the full QWERTY keyboard missing for Twitter -- we've had to rely on the little stylus to log in (for every boot, that is, as it didn't store our credentials) and compose tweets. The lack of reply and direct message filters is a frustration, too, but you can always hit the Twitter website from the app for your regular Twitter features and the full keyboard. On a more positive note, the minimalistic camera gallery panel is pretty slick -- it's essentially a vertical-scrolling, one-at-a-time photo / video viewer, so from afar the panel appears to be a wallpaper showing the latest picture / video still from the camera. Clicking on the image will launch the full media gallery.
There's little to complain about the bog-standard apps such as the media player and organizer. In fact, the delightful music player is pretty much identical to the Satio's -- good to see a familiar feature that works well. The only black sheep here is the web browsing performance and experience -- the phone insists on asking us to pick the connection method (WiFi or 3G) every time we wanted to use Twitter, Facebook or the browser, and then you need to develop the habit of using mobile websites as the browser's crashed on us a few times due to insufficient memory. Neither are acceptable for a smartphone these days, especially the former -- we'd be so much happier if the phone can at least remember or determine our preferred connection method.
Wrap-up
The Vivaz is no doubt a good specimen for showing what Sony Ericsson does best -- great video and photo capture along with a user-friendly media playback interface, not to mention being a world's first with its nice continuous auto-focus 720p video recording. On the other hand, though, the user interface needs some tweaking for the sake of mainly consistency, ease of web access, security (as in so the phone is less likely to unlock itself) and stability (and we hope a software patch will be offered to fix all these). Not much can be done about the phone's build quality now, but we'll let it off this once given the nice curvature for gripping. All in all, we'd say hold off until Sony Ericsson comes up with some software patches -- if they ever get around to it, that is.
Sony Ericsson, you're killing me. Your sexy as hell phones would totally leech my dollars with Android instead of S60.
@Dale P
And this is why we patiently await the Xperia X10.
@Dale P omg. user interface fail.
anyways cool camera placement but wtF is that thing on the side by the camera. the green thing..
?
@emopoops
That's the Sony Ericsson logo.
@emopoops
are you talking about the LED flash or the SE logo?
there is nothing worng with it as I far as I can see
emopoops, Look I've met alot of weird creatures, droids and mentally confused ewoks. But I've never known a human that doesnt recognise the Sony Ericsson logo that constantly comments on the largest Geek and Tech blog in the universe. You bring shame to us all. You are no Imperial trooper of mine. And looking at your comment history, Finish school and come back when you have a vocabulary of more than LOL or OMG and other non sensical words. And your name and Icon annoys me greatly. Emopoops? Skinnier? Some of you may remember my outrage at the knowledge of padmes death (I dont know who uploaded that to youtube), but every comment you make gives me fits of rage that are growing exponentially. I apologise to the empire for wasting valuable page space
@Lord Vader
what he said ^
@Dale P this times one million. SE makes one of the nicest, cleanest handsets I've ever seen. I've been a big fan ever since my W800, and the W810i is STILL one of the BEST phones I've ever used till this day (I still have 2 or 3 lol). I just wish they'd ditch their poop software for nice ol' Andy.
Cortex, not Coretx
1st paragraph
Looks good to me
@grapeDrank
Compared to what...the iphone?
@grapeDrank 2nd that w my w980, but w hd2 has better low light capability. though the camera control could be better like the canon powershot
Android, please!
@VanillaSperm Go to some other troll on some other website, iPhone troll.
looks decent, but the X10 is SE's killer phone
@commenter7 Assuming it's coming out that is (at least in the US).
Interface is very misanthropic.
@fontendet
You should have given the meaning for that word as well
This looks like it would have been a cool phone... in the 90s.
@crichton007 if this existed in the 90s, the events of Terminator 1 and 2 would've happened by now.
@crichton007
A bit of a hyperbole, but I agree...
...I mean really, FastPort? Sony's still clinging onto that?
@Mike
No, the review says that it *lacks* a FastPort. It uses standard micro-USB for charging and data, and a 3,5 mm jack for audio.
Although their feature phones still use FastPort, unfortunately.
LOL he nearly broke his nail when he tried to open the phone, lol lol lol.
Very nice. It's resistive. It's poop.
The video looks awsome, you just got to love that 720 :) So sad every review ends up with a Sony To-Do list (update wise).
I'm actually more interested on that electronic menu you guys were using.
@theehokage lol same here
I'm sorry...I lost all interest when I saw the digital table or the video projection onto the table. Were you ordering your food and drinks through that thing!??! WTF... pure win.
Why no android?
I'm impressed by the video quality.
Ericsson, what happened? You used to be so cool, back in the day, when the Backstreet Boys and the Spice Girls topped the charts and I wasn't even in freaking high school yet. What happened? I guess the hardware at least looks kind of pretty.
@Funderful LOL
I'm on O2 2(too)!
have been using the S60 on the SATIO and not a fan at all.
loose S60 and jump on the android train!
better yet, give us the HTC EVO for europe!!
couldn't resist, sorry :)
**** jumps for joy ****
@liquidmonkey
They will probably use both S60 and Android, and loose Windows.
HTC EVO would be pretty useless in Europe, it has CDMA and WiMAX
both networks have limited support in Europe. But otherwise it looks really nice, but I think I go for Desire or Galaxy S.
@ariarinen
HTC has already confirmed that the EVO will NOT come to europe :( but the desire is looking mighty nice and i will get that in june if no EVO equivalent is announced for europe.
Satio seems much faster even with the photo loading... I know it has worse processor but they didn't overpack it with features...
@pankomputerek Actually I think the Satio has better RAM and better processor than the Vivaz, way above the minimum requierements of Symbian, the problem was bugs in the software, that are now fixed, but that was the problem at the begining.
Pretty neat and for a change, unprejudiced review of a combo that scares the bejeezuz out of the blogosphere (Sony, Symbian, Resistive).
Things of note:
Playnow isn't the only avenue to get Symbian apps. Symbian Horizon, Handango, Datawiz and Dailymobile.se are some popular options.
The apps asking for 3g/wifi every time they need to make a connection is the default behavior. You can set 3G as the permanent connection from the connectivity menu.
When you see a scroll bar, click on it with your fingernail and without lifting up, move it sideways to the middle of the screen. from here, you can move up and down and read the data. No flick scrolling though.
Install Handy task manager. Makes life a lot easier on Symbian.
Gotta love that "human curvature" design!
This prob would have been my next phone then i saw the samsung wave.
S60.
3.2" screen.
Resistive.
So much fail.
well... I can't see it without thinking of LG phones..it looks so like LG phone....LOL...
lol at the capturing a fast moving object in second vid.
a very SE stylist phone but sorry i like a smart phone :)
So Vivaz traveled from UK to NY? Cool!
as soon as i heard touchwiz i died a little on the inside.
Richard's accent is so cool!
Maybe I'll will start to care when it run Android. Otherwise, this phone look d@m S.E.X.Y from behind if only the front utilize the whole black space with a screen instead.
ssx3!
**** yeah!
probably the best in series!