Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro (2)

Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro review: HD gets a Pro flavor

Introduction

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.

Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro official photos

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.

How the Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro stacks up against the competition

Follow us on the next page to explore the hardware of the Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro and find out how the form factor and keyboard affect handling.

Unboxing the Vivaz pro

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro comes in a medium sized box, but it packs only the essentials. There’s a microUSB cable and a charger, which uses the USB cable, and a one-piece headset.

Exploring the Vivaz pro retail package

There’s an 8GB microSD card in the retail package, which is no small thing.

There’s also a user guide in the box and the Sony Ericsson PC Companion application is preloaded on the memory card.
Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro 360-degree spin

At 109 x 52 x 15 mm the Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro is just barely bigger than the original Vivaz – this makes it one of the most compact phones that can shoot 720p videos, and it does well in the hardware QWERTY category too. But put those two features together and the Vivaz pro is perhaps the best you can get in terms of size and weight.

The Vivaz pro continues the Human Curvature trend in Sony Ericsson designs and its looks trace back to the Satio. The Vivaz pro comes in Black or White only – the first Vivaz had more color options, but along with the “Pro” tag comes an air of seriousness we suppose.
Design and construction

The front of the Sony Ericsson Vivaz is almost identical to its QWERTY-less sibling. There’re only minor changes around the earpiece, but those are hard to spot. The sides, and mostly the back, are what has changed the most.

By the way, you’ll only spot the difference if you’ve used a Vivaz before. Otherwise the Vivaz pro is reminiscent of the Sony Ericsson Satio, which kicked off Sony Ericsson’s return to the Symbian OS.

What sets the Vivaz duo apart from the blocky design of the Satio is the Human Curvature design – the curved back for the Vivaz pro makes it more comfortable to hold in hand.

The touchscreen excels in terms of image quality

But let’s stop the comparisons for a second and look at the Vivaz pro with fresh eyes.

The front of the phone is built around the 3.2” screen. It’s set quite low on the face of the Vivaz pro – there’s plenty of headroom above the display, but the keys below the screen feel very cramped, almost pushed off the bottom edge.

This makes the physical keys – a central menu key and the Call and End buttons –and the virtual soft keys at the bottom of the display, a bit uncomfortable to use.

The screen is the same as on the original Vivaz – nHD resolution of 360×640 pixels spanning the 3.2-inch diagonal. The viewing angles are great, colors remain unaffected even at extreme angles.

The screen uses the resistive touch technology, which fails to match the response and sensitivity of capacitive displays, but still does reasonably well.

Unfortunately, the sunlight legibility is poor – the screen washes out when hit by direct sunlight.

Moving away from the screen, we find the earpiece alongside the ambient light sensor. The Vivaz pro lacks a proximity sensor or an auto-locking feature, so the display is always prone to incidental presses during a call. Perhaps they’ll fix that in a future software update.

The hardware keys below the display are a bit too thin and poorly positioned. They are not that hard to use but they still bring usability down.

The three hardware keys at the bottom are thin and a bit stiff • the earpiece at the top

On the left side of the Vivaz pro, the 3.5mm audio jack and the microSD card have swapped places compared to the non-pro Vivaz. The connectivity port is on top with the audio jack just below it. The microUSB port is covered by a plastic flap.

Below the USB port there is a small LED that blinks red while the phone is charging. Towards the bottom of the left side we also find the mic pinhole. Make sure you don’t cover it with your finger when you hold the phone to your ear.

3.5mm jack and microUSB port have swapped places • the mic pin hole is on the left

The right side hosts an array of controls. In the top half, there’s the volume rocker, which also doubles as a digital zoom control. The bottom half offers not one but two shutter keys – one for the still camera and one for the camcorder. Both can start up the camera directly overriding the phone lock.

There are two shutter keys on the Vivaz – one for the still camera and one for the camcorder

The power key of the Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro is placed on the very top of the back of the phone. Quite unusual but the curved top and the slider form factor didn’t leave designers much options. As on any other Symbian handset, you can also use the power key for locking the phone (a double click on the key will do), switching profiles or handling the memory card. The power key location isn’t the most comfortable though..

All there is at the bottom is the lanyard eyelet.

The lanyard attaches at the bottom • the power key is on the back

The back of the phone features the camera lens, which is integral to the Vivaz experience. Unlike the original Vivaz, the camera resolution has been brought down to 5-megapixels but it keeps the 720p video recording.

The star of the show: 5-megapixel autofocus camera with 720p video capability

The camera lens is accompanied by a LED flash. Compared to the unorthodox positioning on the non-pro Vivaz, where the camera was placed very near the center, things on the Vivaz pro are more traditional. The nest of the camera lens protrudes slightly from the back, which makes it scratch-prone.

A small red light between the flash and the power key blinks while the video camera is recording.

Removing the battery cover reveals the 1200 mAh Li-Po EP500 battery – the same as the original Vivaz uses. The cover is quite hard to remove – you need to pull hard at the top and the cover just doesn’t feel flexible enough – we feared breaking it more than once. On the other hand, the rear panel fits tightly in place, no wobbles or creaks.

The microSD card slot is under the battery cover, though not under the battery itself. The Vivaz pro comes with an 8GB microSD card in the package and supports up to 16GB cards.

The SIM card compartment is here too. The SIM eject solution is simple – you just slide the card in and out.

Taking a peek inside the Vivaz • the microSD card slot • the loudspeaker

Sliding out the Vivaz pro reveals a four row QWERTY keyboard. The keys sit quite low to the surface but still have a solid enough press. There’s plenty of room above the top row too. The keyboard’s biggest problem however is that keys are quite small and close together, so you can accidentally press several keys at once. It’s by no means a bad hardware keyboard but it will take some time getting used to. Anyway, four rows of reasonably thumbable keys is the best they could offer on such a compact device.

The Vivaz pro is really pocket-sized – it’s taller and wider than the QWERTY-less variant by a whisker and it’s thicker by only 2.5mm. That’s no small feat considering Sony Ericsson managed to fit a full-fledged QWERTY keyboard. It is 20 grams heavier than its predecessor but at 117 grams the Vivaz pro is one of the lightest phones with QWERTY and a screen over 3-inches.

The phone is quite compact and will slip into your pocket with ease. The curved back lets it sit more naturally in the hand but that’s only true in portrait use. The human curvature doesn’t make much sense in landscape use, plus the phone is wobbly on a level surface. It tilts the wrong way if you place it on a table – keyboard raised and the screen lowered.

Sony Ericsson Vivaz in the hand

The build quality is solid though the slider is not the smoothest we’ve seen. It is spring assisted but requires quite a push to fully open it. If you try to slide it open by putting your fingers on the front and back, you’ll encounter even more resistance.

The black plastic around the display and the display itself will quickly become a fingerprint mess. The back is much better at hiding fingerprints, and the finish is quite nice.

Size comparison of the Vivaz pro with the iPhone and LG GW620

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.

The S60 5th edition homescreen has grown tabs

There are five shortcuts on top of the display, one for each screen. Alternatively, horizontal finger sweeps can be used to navigate the tabs. The transition itself is visually pleasing with smooth animations – even if you switch from the first to the last tab, things will roll across the screen with no lag at all.

There’s a status window at the bottom of the screen, which shows the operator name, time and date (though time is also visible in the status row on top). There are four additional shortcuts at the bottom – Dialer, Media, Messaging and Web search. The End key shows and hides the status window so it doesn’t get in the way of, say, the Twitter app.

The available tabs

Let’s take a closer look at those tabs. They are very similar to the XPERIA panels, but we might say they offer more functionality and style. The five tabs are actually slots that you can fill with your choice of content. Well, almost – you are limited to one of the eight options.

The first one is the Favorite contacts option, which makes the homescreen show a selection of contacts. They are displayed in a list with contact photos if available, so nothing fancy. Tapping a contact brings up a popup with three options – Call, Message, View in contacts.

Favorite contacts • Album tab

The Album option shows a vertical list of all your photos and videos, sorted by date. It comes with kinetic scrolling and is the fastest way to view the latest photos. By the way, for some strange reason kinetic scrolling is not available anywhere else in the interface.

Next up is the Shortcuts option, which puts a list of eight shortcuts on your screen – be they shortcuts to applications or bookmarks.

Then you have the option of setting a tab to show a single picture or a Flash animation, while another option displays running water as an interactive (accelerometer-based) animation.

The final one is the Twitter option, which speaks for itself. It’s a twitter homescreen allowing you to read or post tweets on your profile. We wish there was a Facebook option as well, but there’s been no change.

Shortcuts • Picture • Flow • Twitter tab

The Twitter app lets you post updates and see the updates of the people you follow. It’s not very advanced with no fine grained filtering of posts but it does the job just fine. Sliding out the keyboard rotates the screen into landscape mode.

The Twitter tab goes into landscape mode when you slide out the keyboard

The Vivaz pro main menu is more standard – there’s a choice between grid and list layout, and by default the shortcuts are styled and arranged to resemble the typical Sony Ericsson menu. The icons will feel very familiar to experienced Sony Ericsson or Symbian users, depending on the theme you are currently using.

The main menu depending on the current theme

The rest however is S60 5th edition – the D-pad and soft-key based navigation translated into touchscreen. Lists still require a double tap to select and confirm, while icons take just a single tap. There’s a shortcut to the task switcher or you can long-press the menu key.
Phonebook is typical Symbian

Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro uses the standard Symbian S60 5th edition phonebook. It has virtually unlimited capacity and functionality is among the best we’ve seen. You can set whether the contacts on the SIM card, the phone memory and the service numbers will get displayed.

You can order contacts by first or last name and you can naturally search any contact by gradual typing. To speed things along, the search keyboard is special – letters are in alphabetical order and not the entire alphabet is available. For instance, if there are no contacts whose name starts with a C, the letter C won’t appear on the custom keyboard.

The phonebook hasn’t seen much change • the search keyboard is quite clever

Of course, you can use the physical keyboard to type in the name, but as we said in the previous chapter, you can’t do that directly on the homescreen – you need to launch the phonebook first, which is an extra tap or two.

Editing a contact offers a great variety of preset fields and you can replicate each of them as many times as you like. You can also create new fields if you happen to be able to think of one that’s missing.

You can also assign personal sound ringtones and videos to the individual contacts. If you prefer, you may group your contacts and give each group a specific ringtone.

Viewing a contact • editing a contact offers a huge variety of fields

The Call log keeps track of your recent communications. The application itself comes in two flavors – accessed by pressing the Call key on the standby screen or from the main menu. The first one brings 20 call records in each of its tabs for outgoing, received and missed calls.

The Log application

If you access the Call Log from the main menu, you’ll see a detailed list of all your network communications for the past 30 days. These include messages, calls and data transfers (even WLAN connections are included).
Telephony still needs smart dialing

We didn’t experience any problems with the in-call performance of Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro. Reception levels are good on both ends of a call, the earpiece is loud enough and there were no signal drops whatsoever.

Two things the phone lacks in the Telephony department are Smart dialing and voice dialing. These two are included in other versions of Symbian and should have been available here. On touch phones without keyboards, lacking smart dialing is not that big a deal, but it would have been very useful if you could use the QWERTY keyboard on the Vivaz pro to type in the first few letters of a contact’s name and hit dial.

The dial pad

Thanks to the built-in accelerometer you can silence an incoming call on the phone by simply flipping it over. This works for snoozing alarms too.

Unfortunately, your screen doesn’t switch off during a call, because of the lack of a proximity sensor.

Making a call, call options, dial pad during a call

We also ran our traditional loudspeaker test on Vivaz pro. The handset performed better than the original Vivaz, but it scored only an Average mark for its loudspeaker performance. You might want to keep a closer look on it when it’s noisy around.Speakerphone test Voice, dB Pink noise/ Music, dB Ringing phone, dB Overall score
Samsung I9000 Galaxy S 66.6 65.9 66.6 Below Average
Sony Ericsson Vivaz 64.8 59.8 69.1 Below Average
Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro 69.2 65.6 72.6 Average
Samsung S8500 Wave 69.8 66.6 75.5 Good
Sony Ericsson Satio 71.8 66.1 78.2 Good
HTC HD2 75.7 73.2 75.7 Very Good
HTC Legend 78.0 74.3 79.7 Excellent

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.

Vivaz pro has gained threaded messaging capabilities

As compared to the original Vivaz, a Conversations view mode was added to the Messaging menu – that’s another way of saying threaded messaging. It shows the SMS conversation you’ve had with a contact styled like an IM chat. You can sort conversations by date, name of contact or frequency.

The My Folders feature lets you organize messages into folders.

The email client is really nice, able to meet almost any emailing needs. It prompts you to choose whether you prefer POP or IMAP access to mail providers that support both. However, it failed to fetch the email settings automatically for our Gmail account so we had to do it by hand.

Setting up our Gmail automatically didn’t quite work out

The client can download headers only or entire messages, and can check for new mail automatically at a preset interval.

You can also schedule sending email next time an internet connection is available when you compose emails offline. This can save you some data traffic charges since you can use the next available WLAN connection instead.

Advanced email options

Multiple email accounts and various security protocols are supported, so you can bet almost any mail service will run trouble-free on your Vivaz pro. You can also subscribe to multiple folders, so you can check email in folders other than the Inbox, e.g. the Starred folder in Gmail.

The email client leaves little to worry about

Browsing emails is a bit weird – sweeping your finger selects text and prompts you to copy it. This means you have to use the scrollbar. Easily copying text is great but we would have liked some way to toggle between scrolling and selecting.

There is also support for attachments and signatures – the Vivaz meets virtually all your email needs, and the adequate screen resolution makes reading emails on the device a pleasure.
The text input – can’t beat hardware keyboards

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro offers a complete selection of input methods. Starting from a touch-based alphanumeric keypad, through a portrait mini QWERTY and landscape fullscreen QWERTY, all the way to an actual hardware QWERTY. There’s handwriting recognition too, if for some reason you prefer that.

The four ways to enter text using the touchscreen

The virtual QWERTY on the Vivaz pro does pretty well. Typing is enhanced by accurate haptic feedback and the keys are large enough for typos to be reduced to a healthy minimum. Unfortunately, there is no predictive typing like on the Apple iPhone or the Nokia E71.

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro also offers handwriting recognition, but with a little training, the hardware QWERTY will allow you to type much faster – plus, it doesn’t cover the screen like the virtual version.

So, for five or so keystrokes, one of the virtual keyboards will do fine. But the Vivaz pro is meant for some serious typing action – and nothing beats a physical keyboard at this.

The top row, which is often cramped, gets quite a bit of room above it and there’s plenty of clearing on the sides of the keyboard too, so you won’t accidentally press any keys while holding the phone.

The hardware QWERTY on the Vivaz pro is the real way to type

With four rows, the keyboard fits almost all the common symbols and the rest are accessible too via the alt key. There are also arrow keys and big Enter and Space keys.

There are some missed opportunities though – the Control key does copy/paste/cut (Ctrl+C, etc.) but those are the only shortcuts we found.

There’s also a “globe” key, which offers to change the input language while typing text, handy if you need to enter text in more than one language in the same message, but that key does nothing else (launching the browser for example would have been nice).

Anyway, going back to the keys, they sit quite low, but are easy to press. They are not very big, but there’s room between them, so pressing a couple of keys at once should be fairly rare (but it happens).

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.

The media center in portrait and landscape mode
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.

You can reveal all the available options by tapping on the screen – delete, edit, use as, assign to contact, slideshow, print tag, rotate, information, etc.

The image gallery • landscape mode

There is also a Pictures section, which stores all the preloaded images that were not taken with the phone’s inbuilt camera.

The performance of the gallery is great, but the zooming options are poor. You have to use the volume rocker or the virtual zoom in and out keys. There isn’t even the simplistic double-tap method to help you along.
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.

Music menu • Walkman music player • the homescreen controls

The Vivaz pro doesn’t offer equalizers or alternative visualizations. The homescreen player controls are also missing, but since the previous Vivaz had them, it was probably just our unit acting up.

The equalizer app

There’s a free equalizer app you can download from Play Now. You can read more about it here.
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.

The video player could have used DivX support

When it comes to the watching experience itself, the Vivaz pro is great. The screen is particularly well suited with its high resolution and 16:9 aspect ratio (so HD content can be downsampled with no black bars).

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro also offers TV-Out and you can choose to output in Normal or Widescreen modes. If your TV set is DLNA enabled, you can use the Media server app instead – we’ll look at it later on in the review.
FM radio has RDS, TrackID

The integrated FM radio of the Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro has memory for 20 stations and RDS support. It has a nice interface and makes great use of the TrackID music recognition service. The radio can be minimized in the background much like the music player.

The FM radio has RDS this time around • TrackID
Good audio quality

The fact that Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro has the exact same audio output as its QWERTY-less brother is hardly a surprise. This means that the Vivaz Pro lacks some loudness but compensates with a nice clean output and a few great marks in our audio reproduction quality test.

The noise level, dynamic range and stereo crosstalk are particularly impressive, while both of the distortion readings are pretty decent.

The cut-off extreme bass frequencies are the only slight shortfall of the Vivaz Pro frequency response. However it is excellent for the rest of the audible range so that’s no biggie.

Here go the results so you can see for yourselves.Test Frequency response Noise level Dynamic range THD IMD + Noise Stereo crosstalk
Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro +0.37, -1.91 -88.0 87.4 0.0099 0.129 -88.7
Sony Ericsson Vivaz +0.39, -1.94 -86.2 85.7 0.011 0.143 -85.7
Sony Ericsson Satio +0.37, -2.02 -87.0 86.3 0.011 0.125 -84.3
Samsung i8910 Omnia HD +1.29 -2.74 -87.6 86.6 0.0023 0.255 -85.2
Sony Ericsson W902 +7.31, -2.18 -81.7 84.1 0.0039 0.020 -85.4
HTC Hero +1.04 -2.13 -91.3 92.3 0.458 0.902 -95.8
Sony Ericsson W910 +0.25, -1.25 -81.5 82.7 0.0071 0.028 -81.9
Nokia N97 +0.04, -0.27 -90.7 90.7 0.0048 0.896 -89.5

Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro vs Samsung S8500 Wave

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.

Camera interface

The settings menu gives you another set of customizable options. Those include self-timer, white balance, flash on/off, effects, image stabilizer and picture size. You can also choose whether you’ll see a preview of every taken snapshot and if the image orientation should be recorded in the EXIF info. The camcorder part of the camera supports a very similar set of customizable settings except the image stabilization.

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro camera caries over the cool features from the 8MP camera of the first Vivaz. For the autofocus settings, there’s face detection and touch focus, and there are other features too, like smile detection, geotagging and panorama mode.

As the name suggests, Touch capture allows you to focus on any particular subject in the frame by simply tapping on it in the viewfinder. The Vivaz pro will automatically focus on it and take the shot.

There are handy help buttons for most features, but you could just tap the Auto button and let the phone worry about picking the right settings – you just point and click.

Speaking of clicking, just like the other Vivaz, the Vivaz pro has two shutter keys – one for the still camera and the other for the camcorder. The still camera shutter can be half pressed to lock focus.

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.

Here go the Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro samples.

Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro camera samples

Synthetic resolution

We also snapped our resolution chart with the Vivaz pro. You can check out what that test is all about here.

Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro resolution chart photo • 100% crops

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.

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro videos use an AAC codec with 48kHz sampling rate, which produces a much better audio quality.

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.

The web browser

At least the page rendering is quite good, making all the pages look as if browsed on a desktop PC. The high resolution is also welcome here, as it allows more content to fit on the screen.

There is also a login auto-fill interface searching on pages, RSS support along with visual history and bookmarks, which have an automatic subfolder “Recently visited pages”.

Finally, the web browser has support for both Flash and Java, which means you can enjoy flash videos straight in your browser without having to use the mobile versions of sites like YouTube. It’s Flash Lite so not all Flash content works but a lot of it does.

In terms of speed, the browser performs very well and though there were occasional lags, the videos played smoothly most of the time. It’s hard to position the player so that it takes up most of the screen though and the fullscreen option doesn’t work.

So, generally speaking, the S60 touch-browser is nicely equipped but fails to address some basic usability shortcomings.
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.

Some of the calendar views and available settings

Quickoffice is also highly functional with preinstalled viewers for Word, Excel and PowerPoint files – Office 2007 docs are supported too (.DOCX and the like). The PDF viewer was preinstalled on our unit and it was a full version, no trials this time around.

Only viewing of documents is supported out of the box

Unfortunately, editing documents is not supported on the included Quickoffice version – that was OK for the first Vivaz with no keyboard, but with a “Pro” tag, we expected to get better office support. If you would like editing enabled you will have to buy the additional license.

What’s even more annoying is that you can’t tap and drag in the doc viewer to scroll or pan around – each time you do, the app thinks you want to edit the file and tells you that you need to buy a license over and over again.

The organizer package also includes a great unit converter, a calculator and a voice recorder, as well as the Notes application.

Some of the other organizer apps

The alarm application allows you to set up as many alarms as you want, each with its own name, trigger day and repeat pattern. If this seems too complicated, there is a quick alarm setup where all you do is set the time and you’re good to go. This is quite convenient for, say, setting up your wake-up alarm.

In addition, the number of alarms is not limited. Thanks to the built-in accelerometer you can also snooze the alarm by simply flipping your phone over.

We quite like the alarm application
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.

DataViz Roadsync is an ActiveSync client

SMS Preview is a handy tool, which previews incoming SMS messages on the homescreen so you won’t even have to unlock the phone to read the message. You can set up how long the preview lasts. To start using SMS Preview though, you have to activate the app, which requires sending a single international SMS.

SMS Preview displays incoming texts on the homescreen

The Media server app does the DLNA magic and turns your Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro into a media server. Devices that support DLNA – many TVs and any computer with a supported media player – can view photos, videos and play music off your phone.

The Media server app adds DLNA to the Vivaz pro

The devices connect over Wi-Fi – Windows Media Player, for example, found the Vivaz pro automatically, so this is a real hassle-free way to show off your photos.

World Mate is a travel advisor for weather, flights, etc. The Web publishing helps with uploading your photos and videos to the likes of Facebook, YouTube, Twitpic, Picasa and so on.

There’s also the NeoReader app, which does the job of reading barcodes.

World Mate

The Facebook app is a full-blown client. It separates things into two tabs – your stuff (wall, galleries, messages, contacts, etc.) and your friends’ stuff. Updating your status is easy and so is viewing a contact’s photos for example.

Facebook

The app is a native Symbian app and it’s fairly touch optimized. If the contact has added a phone number to their profile, there are buttons that let you quickly call them or send them a text. There’s no phonebook integration however.

Our Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro came with no games preinstalled – this could be a regional thing. Play Now wasn’t much help this time – there were games, but they cost too much.
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.

Wisepilot navigation software

Its main downside is that maps are not stored locally but instead get downloaded over the air. A flat data fee is definitely recommended if you’re out and about but 1MB of data should get you about 600km of navigation.

Still, we would have liked to have a map downloader as well. It really would have helped avoid roaming data charges.

We also wish there was a built-in compass, like on most of its competitors, to facilitate navigation.

Google Maps is included as well if you prefer it.

Google Maps

Final words

We’ve had plenty of positive things to say about the Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro and some not so positive. In the end, it’s how the pros and cons balance. It looks like a simple trade-off: still camera downgraded, QWERTY keyboard added. But hey, keeping the compact size is quite an achievement.

The hardware QWERTY is the obvious improvement over the vanilla Vivaz. The still cameras are in different leagues but the 5MP snapper on the Vivaz pro is very near the best in class and the 720p video capabilities haven’t suffered.

Sony Ericsson Vivaz • Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 mini pro

The thickness and weight went up, but in the world of slide-out QWERTY the thickness is to be expected and the weight of the Vivaz pro is more than reasonable. The Motorola MILESTONE is slimmer (13.7mm) but weighs a good 48 grams more. In fact, the Vivaz pro is 3 grams lighter than even the petite Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 mini pro.

The software side of things is unchanged from the first Vivaz. We like what Sony Ericsson have done with the homescreen, the media and the camera UI but Symbian S60 5th edition has a few updates that still haven’t made their way to the Vivaz pro – basic usability upgrades like kinetic scrolling in list and grid menus.

It’s hard to find a competing phone with both hardware QWERTY and 720p video recording, but if you’re willing to go down to D1 or VGA video, there’s quite a lot to choose from.

An option from Sony Ericsson is the XPERIA X10 mini pro. It’s super compact and uses the more touch-friendly Android OS (though only v1.6 Donut) and has a respectable 600MHz CPU. The camera is 5MP again but the video is no match at VGA@30fps. So, there are some compromises to be made when picking the X10 min pro over Vivaz pro, but the diminutive size and better OS are two compelling points in X10 mini pro’s favor.

While we are on the subject of Android, we can’t help but mention the Motorola MILESTONE (a.k.a. DROID Stateside). It’s slightly thinner and the 3.7-inch screen of 480×854 pixel resolution is brilliant. The keyboard is excellent and there’s an 8GB microSD card in the box. The major downside is that the MILESTONE records videos in D1@30fps tops.

Motorola MILESTONE • Microsoft Kin Two • LG Optimus Q

If you insist on having both 720p video recording and a hardware QWERTY, the alternatives to the Vivaz pro are very few. Unless you happen to live in South Korea (in which case, check out the LG Optimus Q), the only real alternative oddly enough seems to be the Microsoft Kin Two.

It’s got a bigger (though slightly lower-res) screen, an 8GB built-in memory expandable by a microSD card slot. The camera is an 8MP sharpshooter with 720p video recording. The whole thing runs on NVIDIA’s Tegra platform, but the OS is much more limited than Symbian. It does have all its social networking bases covered though.

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz pro is not perfect, but the camera is keeping it afloat. Still images are good enough and 720p video is a premium feature to have on a phone. The QWERTY keyboard is the real premise though for the existence of the Vivaz pro. Users like to have a choice, and makers seem to understand that. Even if it means investing into niche products. The Vivaz pro will appeal to the always-connected crowd, and sometimes that’s just enough for a handset to do well.

Source : http://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_vivaz_pro-review-482p8.php