Sony Ericsson Vivaz (5)

The biggest lurch is the way application icons have been scattered, almost at random, in the different application folders. When you dig deeper, you realise that the distribution of icons has been forced on Sony Ericsson by the absence of (N97 v20-style) kinetic scrolling across the interface. Not only are the static screens and fiddly scrollbars an utter nuisance across almost all applications, but the lack of scrolling in the application folders means that, rather than confuse the user still further, Sony Ericsson has chosen (rather crudely) to simply default all folders to 12 icons, so that, out of the box, there isn’t any apparent need to scroll.

The awkward reshuffling has meant, for example, that RoadSync, Quickoffice (viewers) and Adobe PDF are all now located within ‘Organiser’, while the media apps ‘Radio’, ‘TrackID’ and ‘Sound recorder’ are all forced into ‘Applications’ rather than being covered within the ‘Media’ suite/area mentioned above. Thankfully, you can (as is usual with S60) move applications around from folder to folder if any of these assignments really offend you.

Pressing the central S60 menu key reveals the familiar icon system, even if Sony Ericsson has jiggled everything round a little. Here are the main differences from a typical Nokia S60 5th Edition phone:
PlayNow is a shortcut to the mobile version of the Sony Ericsson content store. In terms of applications, the total number of titles is around 200, around 3 or 4 times less than the equivalent scene in the Nokia Ovi Store – for example, Gravity’s not present – but still, it has to be said, enough to get the new user started. Though they’d still be better off playing with my own top 20 freeware list!

Basing everything on the web is simpler than Nokia’s system of using a Web runtime widget, but it has its own issues. Not least navigation. Open up PlayNow and browse around a little. You’re offered ‘Close’ on the right soft key and so you use it. You’d think that this closed down the browser window. Not so. It’s still open in the background but you have to be a Web-savvy geek to find your way back to it via the ‘Internet’ browser’s sub-menu. Instead, next time you tap on PlayNow, you get another instance of Web. And then another (see the ‘window count’ at the top of the photo below). And then another, until you’ve hit the internal limit within Web and everything starts to fall down around you. Confusing for the unwary and extremely inelegant.

TrackID, Sony Ericsson’s beloved music identification system, is included, and, for current popular music, works rather well. Give it 10 seconds or so of any song, just held up to the Vivaz’s microphone, and you’re taken to a web page which lists the track name, artist and album, along with the chance to buy the song from your network operator’s music store – an interesting tie-in. For everyday users, TrackID is a potentially showstopping feature, but you don’t have to venture far away from mainstream tastes for recognition to nose dive.

Google Maps 3.0 (above, right) is included in the firmware and, thankfully, it was easy enough to upgrade this to the latest v4.0.0 – no getting stuck on an old version here.
Google Talk and IM+ for Jabber are licensed versions of Shape Services chat client, with download shortcuts for each, plus there’s S60’s pretty useless generic IM client as well.

Media Server is a DNLA utility, letting you access Vivaz content from other home UPnP/DNLA-compatible equipment (nothing in my household, though!). But if you have an Xbox 360, PS3 or other UPnP devices this is a definite plus.

A trial version of Wisepilot, a real time, online sat nav application. You can extend its license using phone credit or other payment means. You get 30 days trial and then have to pay roughly 10 Euros a month (there’s seemingly no way to get an accurate cost until your 30 days are up, after which you’re prompted to buy through the handset). Although smooth enough, there’s the issue of being seen in comparison to the far, far slicker Ovi Maps, which is totally free, there’s also no local storage of maps, let alone preloading of maps, disappointingly, so best stay away from areas with poor data signal(!) Finally, for the tech snobs here, Wisepilot is written in Java – normally a complete no-no for something as ambitious as this, but then it could equally well be argued that, like Opera Mini, Wisepilot is a shining example of what can be achieved using Java on a modern device.

Opening screen and in-map menu

Zoomed right in, the limited Java graphics are evident; functionality is all there though…

Like Ovi Maps, there are extras, here showing Weather and the Trip Report summary
DataViz’s RoadSync is licensed, for easy synchronisation of your PIM data and email to Microsoft Exchange.

Web publishing (above right) is supposedly Sony Ericsson’s answer to Nokia’s ‘Share online’, supporting YouTube, Facebook, PicasaWeb and Blogger out of the box. The utility itself is a completely under whelming in terms of user interface. There’s a ‘New web album service’ function on the menu, but this just brings up the generic PlayNow system without much clue as to where to go next. There’s also a ‘New web site’ function, but this just adds a shortcut to the appropriate mobile site. And tapping on any of the supported services just brings up a ‘Cannot edit’ error. All a bit half-hearted, even if the individual services are supported from the appropriate applications elsewhere.

SSX 3, a licensed snow-boarding game from Polarbit – it’s pretty decent and has accelerometer/tilt control, if you’re into zooming down mountains trying to avoid trees and rocks

Rally Master Pro, a licensed driving game from Fishlabs. Even slicker than SSX 3 and also accelerometer/tilt-steered, Rally Master Pro really takes advantage of the RAM and graphics acceleration in the Vivaz, to produce a silky smooth experience, with texture mapped everything and realistic scenery. Top marks on all counts, even if the brakes on the virtual car are savagely sensitive!

SMS Preview, the popular freeware utility that lets you glimpse incoming SMS without having to stop and open them up properly.
Conversations – this seems to be similar to Nokia’s Conversations tool and attempts to re-order your SMS inbox according to sender. Conversations is also available within Messaging itself, a nice idea.

Worldmate (above right) is the usual free – but with some paid content – weather, time and flight information tool.
Water level is an accelerometer-driven levelling tool, a little inaccurate in ‘laid flat’ mode because the back of the Vivaz itself isn’t necessarily going to balance level, but rather more useful in ‘vertical’ mode – at which point the tiny plastic ‘foot’ on the Vivaz’s side finally becomes useful, in helping to balance the phone on its side.

Facebook isn’t the usual S60 5th Edition Web runtime-based client, but a Java client produced for Sony Ericsson by the Italian company Opentech ENG. it’s not that slick, but it’s as good as the WRT one on Nokias, so I won’t declare a winner.

Sony Ericsson Sync sets up a handy account on their servers to sync your Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Notes and web bookmarks, probably using SyncML, though this isn’t stated. The service is free, which is good. I can lots of owners using this as an extra backup (over and above using the PC Suite for local sync).

On the negative side, the following applications, familiar from Nokia S60 phones, are missing from the Sony Ericsson Vivaz:
Nokia Maps, it’s obviously nowhere to be seen on this Sony Ericsson device, though arguably Google Maps and WisePilot take up some of the strain.

Sw_update – or indeed any kind of Over The Air updating. Firmware here is so far only upgradeable via Sony Ericsson’s Update Service on a Windows PC. This is a major downside in 2010, tying updates to a PC seems very old fashioned – and only ensures that most Vivaz owners don’t actually get round to updating to the latest OS and thereby get bug fixes.

Zip manager. Admittedly this isn’t used that much these days by casual users, but it’s disappointing that Sony Ericsson hasn’t licensed this from Epocware as Nokia did.

Active notes. No big deal, I don’t know anyone who uses this odd-ball rich note-taking system (because it doesn’t sync to anything).

Podcasting. Ah yes, this is a biggie for me, and probably for you, the reader, too. Starting life as a Nokia internal project, Podcasting hasn’t been contributed to the Symbian Foundation for this release, meaning that Sony Ericsson would have to follow Samsung in licensing the code from Nokia. This they haven’t done, but thankfully both the third party tool Escarpod and its official replacement Podcatcher install on the Vivaz and help fill the gap.

(In case you’re wondering why there are lots of photos of screens in this review, it’s because something really weird and non-standard in the Satio’s graphics system interferes with our tool of choice, Best Screensnap, most of the time. Ah well….)

Other S60 applications not mentioned are largely unchanged from the baseline S60 5th Edition specification, aside from cosmetic differences here and there. In particular, Web has been renamed ‘Internet’ and is the same slightly clunky klunky build as featured in the Nokia 5800 with its original firmware. No kinetic scrolling, no automatic full-screen, no next-gen Webkit engine, relatively slow page rendering, and so on. And of course this module is also used as the engine to power the PlayNow system, used throughout the Vivaz, impacting its performance as well… It’s all rather underwhelming on a 2010-spec phone and here’s hoping Sony Ericsson can update the version of Web in firmware.

On balance, though, the application bundle is comparable with that on most Nokia S60 5th Edition phones, though one or more of the differences noted above may put some hardened Nokia fans off and it’s fairly obvious that the app mix is less balanced than on the likes of the Nokia 5800 or Nokia N97 mini. But, as with Samsung on the i8910 HD, it’s not too difficult to replace most of the bits you might expect on a Nokia and, glitches aside, there are a few extras which may positively put a smile on your face (Water Level, Rally Master Pro).

Summary

Pros:

Superb form factor, in terms of maximising spec with minimal size and weight; Feels gorgeous in the hand (despite being plastic)

Great computing spec: capable processor, graphics acceleration, plenty of RAM, reasonable internal internal/system disk

Good phone capabilities – signal, speaker volume, battery life

Camera: Great stills quality in good or indifferent light (with care); Good camera interface with cutting edge options, including touch-to-focus and smile detection

Camcorder: Good 720p video (for a phone), with really usable continuous autofocus in good light
Cons:

Rather than improve their S60 build, the Vivaz team opted to leave this in clunky form and add on their own swish front end and media suite. Leaving the user with two completely different UIs, neither of which is remotely close to being perfect

No mass memory disk, you’ll need to budget for a huge microSD (100MB/min for captured HD video, for example) – suggest 16GB card minimum, by the time you’ve put on your music and podcasts (etc.)

Camera: No camera glass protection and no conventional LED flash for low light stills

Choice of screen tech means that it’s hard to see the display (or what you’re shooting) when the sun’s out

Resistive touch screen grates a little. Given that they bothered to put in a glass substrate and given the media pretensions, this is an excellent example of a Symbian phone which should have gone ‘capacitive’ (à la the Nokia X6)

What comes across in the Vivaz is that it’s definitely a second generation S60 product from Sony Ericsson (after years of UIQ experience) – there are far fewer bugs and glitches in the firmware, the hardware feels far more refined and the software load-out has less holes. However, it’s often the third generation of any tech product which really gets it right (Microsoft Windows being the classic example, though S60 3rd Edition and the iPhone 3GS also spring to mind) and what’s needed here is something with the hardware specs and ambitions of the Vivaz but with Symbian^3, a capacitive, transflective touchscreen (iPhone-style) and a proper camera flash system (heck, make it Xenon and I’d be even happier).

I’m sure that, even as you’re reading this, Sony Ericsson are beavering away in secret on something close to my wishlist. Not the Vivaz Pro (which in some ways is cut down from the Vivaz) but a true successor in the Satio-Vivaz lineage, a device that can really make the most of the powerful internal hardware.

As for the Vivaz, be ruled by my table above. Buy it for the unique camcorder functions or because of the size and weight, but make sure you’ve consciously dismissed all the negatives beforehand.

Source : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/Sony_Ericsson_Vivaz-part_4_applications_and_wrap-up.php

Sony Ericsson Vivaz (4)

Homescreen

As with the Satio, the Vivaz uses vanilla S60 5th Edition, with no Symbian-provided bells and whistles (sadly), but with a custom ‘kinetic’ front end added by Sony Ericsson. This comprises a Flash-based replacement standby theme, plus a comprehensive (native Symbian) media suite (music, photos, videos).

The Flash-based standby system is fine as far as it goes, but ultimately it’s arguably a lot more limited than similar systems in other 2010 smartphones. The current options, for each of the five ‘tabs’ are:
Favourite contacts (you have to pick up to 8 manually from your main Contacts store)

Shortcuts (a simple text list of 8 items, to applications or web bookmarks)

Album (a vertical kinetic-scrolling strip of full-screen previews of your latest stills/videos)

Flow (an accelerometer-enabled animated wallpaper – a bit of a gimmick, to be honest)

Twitter (a Flash app that’s, to be honest, not even worth including here – it’s so rudimentary – timeline/post tweet only – that even casual users will outgrow it in a day. And it seems to need your Twitter login re-entering every single day – by hand)

Picture (static wallpaper)

Adobe Flash (in theory a gateway for a catalogue of other Flash apps, though there’s only a mobile aquarium and a puzzle game at present)

The limited content within the Adobe Flash catalog on the Vivaz – hitting ‘Download’ just brings up the web browser with no clue as to where to go next

All of which is probably enough for the average phone user, but there’s a distinct paucity of options and content when compared to that for the Nokia N97 homescreen, for example. In addition, as with the media suite (see below) on the Satio, there’s a definite sense of lagginess – probably a side effect of using Flash as the platform for this function, plus I experienced several crashes of the Flash runtime, resulting in having to not only turn the phone off but also (in one case) to remove the battery as well. Admittedly, this is still initial firmware for the Vivaz, but I have to say that the Sony Ericsson tabbed homescreen didn’t win my heart on any level. Well….. maybe the aquarium – that brought a smile to my face every time it came up!

As you might expect for a S60 phone, there are alternatives when thinking about ‘home’ screens:
‘Finger use’ is the standard S60 app shortcuts, plus music control and Calendar upcoming entries, with chunky icons, all optimised for err… finger use(!)

‘Full page’ is the same system, but with clock, date and six (rather than four) smaller app shortcut icons – this is my favourite standby theme for use on the Vivaz, to be honest – but then I’m a hardened S60 user. A newcomer might well prefer the more glitzy Sony Ericsson default version.

‘Basic’, with just a clock, date and wallpaper

‘Navigation bar’, comprising a vertical strip of tiny, not-very-finger friendly icons, each with sub-functions. All very Orange, circa 2003, and very unsuited to use on the Vivaz. Best avoided.

Overlaid on top of the default Flash-based homescreen is a semi-transparent overlay, with extra confirmation of time, plus date, current music track control and shortcuts to a dialler, to the Media suite (see below), to Messaging and to a custom version of Google Mobile App. This latter doesn’t have the Gmail, Maps and YouTube shortcuts of other versions, but it does have a separate button for searching local content (i.e. on the phone). And, unlike on the Satio before it, this has been optimised to return results in seconds rather than minutes. Opening a found item from there then takes a little longer – it really does feel like there’s plenty of work to be done on getting the S60 applications to work efficiently with these Sony Ericsson additions.

Media Suite

The other big addition is the Media Suite, purportedly replacing S60’s Music player, Realplayer and Gallery/Photos. Most of the common functions are certainly replaced, but I couldn’t help notice that some functions I’m used to using (e.g. Equalizer in Music player) weren’t catered for, out of the box. Interestingly, although a kinetic browsing interface is used throughout this section (and very nice it is too), the Sony Ericsson code still spawns out to the original S60 code when things get tough, e.g. when playing a video or editing a photo.

Taking the three modules, Photo, Music and Video, in sequence:

Photo offers:
‘Latest photo’

‘Camera album’ (with items sorted by month)

‘Photo tags’

‘Web albums’ (to just Facebook and PicasaWeb – there’s a ‘New service’ option, but this just leads to a PlayNow service dead-end. It’s very strange not to have Flickr, the most visible photo sharing site in the world, present as a default)

‘Pictures’, which displays images on your memory card which aren’t taken by the onboard camera

Rather bizarrely, the Sony Ericsson viewing software mimics one big idiosyncrasy of the Nokia original, in that your captured videos show up in ‘Photo’ as well as in ‘Video’. Very annoying, I’ve been wanting this anomaly sorted out for years.

When viewing photos, although there are no zoom icons shown/available by default, the volume/zoom keys on the Vivaz’s side do work (and, curiously, zoom icons appear on-screen after you’ve started the process off with the buttons), with a small corner thumbnail showing where you ‘are’ in a photo when zoomed right in. Zooming performance is good, as you’d expect with the powerful graphics chip inside the phone.

Along the bottom (or right, if the phone’s in landscape mode) of the screen are four icons, mimicking a traditional S60 left-Options, right-back layout, with the addition of ‘Send’ and ‘Delete’. The Options menu turns out to be a pane of icons, but the functions are largely the same. In truth there’s little that’s new here for experienced S60 users, aside from the eye candy animated swirls that swish around underneath the thumbnails when looking at albums.

Music offers:
‘Artists’
‘Albums’
‘Tracks’
‘Playlists’
‘Audiobooks’
‘Podcasts’
‘My recordings’

In similar fashion to ‘Photo’, there’s nothing new in the music player, apart from the cosmetic reworking, with the traditional textual menu now represented by a pop-up pane of icons. Underneath the skin, it’s still S60’s Music player and has the same quirks (e.g. horribly unreliable album art). The Vivaz comes with a cheap pair of hard and unpleasant headphones, but binning these and plugging in a decent set of in-ear headphones proved that the sound exiting the Vivaz itself was quite decent.

As on Nokia’s X6, also without a physical keypad or keyboard, there’s no way to find music while in the Music player module. Instead, to search for a song, you’ve got to back right out to the main homescreen Search function and then go from there. As with the X6, given that the Nokia 5800 and the baseline S60 5th Edition code both had a ‘Find’ function built-in, it’s criminal that this has not been implemented here in some form.

And the Vivaz hits another oddity here, in that, after finding a music track and setting it playing, the player used is totally different from the core Music player, meaning that you can’t then get to it using the ‘Now playing’ (‘Play’) icon). It’s only a little thing, but very annoying.

Sadly, unlike Nokia’s Nseries S60 phones, there’s no EQ here to play around with – what you hear is what you get (although a free utility has now been released, for those in the know). There’s just a single speaker for direct listening and this is a bit ‘flat’ in sound, but is OK for casual listening or spoken word podcasts. Or would be if there were a podcatching app included….

The inclusion of Audiobooks and Podcasts in the Music menu looks promising, but it seems this is just a filter for music files on your microSD which happen to be tagged as audio books or podcasts – there’s absolutely no mechanism to automatically grab new programmes (as in Nokia’s Podcasting client, also licensed by Samsung). Disappointing, but a workable system as long as you’re happy researching and downloading books and podcasts on your PC. There’s the third party Escarpod, of course, worth experimenting with.

Video offers:
‘YouTube’ – this is v2.2.33, fairly recent, but not the latest, which includes YouTube login and more features. I tried installing the latest 2.4.4, but the Vivaz threw up an error, saying that I couldn’t overwrite a built-in app, sadly.

‘BBC iPlayer’ – not the usual widget that’s on Nokia phones, but a shortcut to the iPlayer mobile web site. There’s no downloading, but you can still stream programmes.

‘Music videos’ – a shortcut to a premium area of the Sony Ericsson PlayNow store – your wallet required, oddly, given that almost all music videos are available for free on YouTube!

‘TV shows’ – ditto, but for TV shows, somewhat more understandable in a commercial context.

‘Movie trailers’ – a shortcut to a free area of PlayNow on the web, where mobile-optimised trailers can be found. This works OK, but it’s clunky compared to simply watching via YouTube.

‘Videos’ – miscellaneous videos that didn’t come from the Vivaz’s camera.

‘Camera videos’ – as it sounds. The same videos that also show up in ‘Photo’. So – just as crazy as in many older Nokia handsets.

Watching videos on the Vivaz was generally trouble-free, with the usual caveats about not being able to handle DivX, XviD and other desktop-class video standards. With video watching being an indoor ‘sport’, the TFT display was a benefit and not a hindrance, as was the ‘good enough’ speaker – plus there’s that 3.5mm jack for headphones to handle the soundtrack when you’re on a bus or train.

Although the infamous video browsing bug from the Satio has been fixed (phew), I did experience a few glitches. At once point I lost a number of captured videos – the OS was deleting them right after rendering the thumbnail to use in the Media suite browser! This happened again and again until I restarted the phone – and all was then well again. Worrying though – Sony Ericsson need to nail this bug before it seriously bites a customer.

Interface notes

The use of two different interfaces within the one phone (or three, if you count the homescreen) makes for a messy experience for the end user. Yes, Sony Ericsson do like to match up as much of a smartphone’s interface as possible to the look and feel of the rest of their (feature) phone range, but ultimately there’s little excuse for this degree of laziness. For example, the media suite (which works pretty well here, unlike on the bugged Satio) uses an all-black theme with animated swirls. Very pretty, but this can’t be changed, making something of a lurch when the main S60 interface is all in (for example) your chosen sunburst yellows and orange. Similarly for the Sony Ericsson tabbed homescreen theme, which also ignores the basic phone theme that’s loaded.

Then there’s the way application icons have been scattered, almost at random, in the different application folders. When you dig deeper, you realise that the distribution of icons has been forced on Sony Ericsson by the absence of (N97 v20-style) kinetic scrolling across the interface. Not only are the static screens and fiddly scrollbars an utter nuisance across almost all applications (it’s at this point that you remember why S60 5th Edition initially got itself a bad name), but the lack of scrolling in the application folders means that, rather than confuse the user still further, Sony Ericsson has chosen (rather crudely) to simply default all folders to 12 icons, so that, out of the box, there isn’t any apparent need to scroll.

Going the extra mile, as Nokia did (eventually), and implementing full kinetic scrolling across the interface would have helped bridge the yawning gap between the S60 interface and the Sony Ericsson one – as would opening up the Sony Ericsson extensions to use the current S60 theme. With these two steps in place, things would have looked far more integrated.

Source : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/Sony_Ericsson_Vivaz-part_3_applications_and_wrap-up.php

Sony Ericsson Vivaz (3)

Watch the Vivaz commercial and you’ll see that the HD video recording is THE feature that Sony Ericsson are shouting about. Fair enough, though it should be noted that the stills camera is pretty hot too – in most light conditions possibly the best 8 megapixel phone camera I’ve tried. All of which is surprising, given the dimunitive size of the Vivaz – the lens used and (more importantly, I suspect) the sensor and supporting electronics inside are obviously of very high quality. I’m expecting the Vivaz’s camera specs to be matched by other phones throughout 2010, but credit to this model for being first on the block.

As mentioned in part 1, the camera glass is that of the camera itself, since this ‘pokes through’ the back cover, avoiding having yet another layer of plastic between the outside world and the camera lens. 1 step forwards but then another step backwards for having such fragile and important optics exposed at all on a top-flight camera phone. Especially as the glass is very, very close to the centre of gravity when placed on potentially dirty and gritty desks and furniture.

The camera interface is very different from that in Nokia’s S60 5th Edition phones, as you can see here. In Samsung-style, icons are placed along the left and right edges, for easy control. And, aside from the missing ‘flash’ option (of which more below), everything you’d ever need is here. Working my way anti-clockwise round the standard camera interface:
‘Scenes’ (Night, Sports, etc)

‘Shooting mode’ (Normal, panoramic, smile detection and touch-to-focus, this last being unique in the Symbian smartphone world so far, another Vivaz first)

‘Focus’ (Auto, Face detection, Macro, Landscape)

‘Exposure’

‘Auto’ mode on/off (this hides all the above and simplifies things for the real novice)

‘Settings’ (self-timer, resolution, light (of which more below), white balance, image stabilisation, special effects, geotagging, etc.)

‘Media’ (shortcut to your latest photos and videos)

‘Back’ (to whatever was in the foreground before you launched the Camera software)

So pretty comprehensive (with the one exception) and easy to use. Mind you, I also found Nokia’s camera interface easy to use – they’re just different.

Looking at results, the 8 megapixel photos are, in good light, superb, as you can see here (click through to enlarge or download the original JPG):

Now for a few shots that didn’t work as well:

In each case, there’s over-exposure and a degree of lens flare, typical for camera glass which is normally left unprotected – microscratches then refract strong light and cause the flare.

I was curious about pitching the Vivaz against a previous 8 megapixel champion – the Samsung i8510. Specifically looking at resolution, detail and handling of light and dark. I took three test scenes with each device, with absolutely everything identical in terms of camera position and time.

Firstly, I took a shot of a tree about 30 metres away, against a gorgeous blue sky, and then examined the branch detail at 1:1 level (remember, on an 8mp photo, this is zoomed in a long way). On the left is that from the Vivaz, on the right is the detail from the i8510:

The Vivaz’s photo is definitely inferior, partly due to levels of Nokia-esque digital processing and sharpening – which typically hate capturing greenery, with all that inconvenient similarly-coloured detail. Onto another test, this time in indifferent indoor lighting conditions:

Here the tables are, arguably, turned, with the Vivaz’s algorithms turning up better clarity and more accurate colours. We’re heavily into the law of diminishing returns here, in that different shots will turn up a different winner. The Samsung i8510 seems to take better photos in good light, though with colours that are a bit over-saturated, while the Vivaz is pretty good outdoors but excels (compared to other phone cameras) indoors. It’s true that Vivaz photos in poor light are less impressive than in good light – insert my usual need-for-Xenon-flash-rant in here…. but the sensor in the Vivaz does a lot better than most phones I’ve tried. Here’s a sample taken in artificial light, the room bulb was only 60W, and yet the digital noise is very low…

(Again, click through to download or enlarge)

Here are some more low light photos for you to download/enlarge and examine:

Not at all bad, which got me thinking that I’d like to pitch the Vivaz against the Nokia N86, the previous low light champion (on account of its great sensor and variable aperture). Here are shots of the same test shelf of cuddly toys, this time taken in low natural light, in this case with curtains closed – it was darker than it looks from the photos. First up is the Nokia N86’s attempt, with LED flash turned off:

Then the Vivaz’s capture of the same scene:

Quite a difference, showing how good the Vivaz’s camera sensor is. Remember that the N86 was the previous low light (i.e. no flash) champion.

However, the low light performance is just as well, since the Vivaz lets the user down horribly once things get even darker. Unbelievably, there’s no traditional flash here at all. The LED is pitched as a ‘light’, the idea being that you’re in a dark place so you delve into the menus to turn on the ‘Light’ setting, at which point the LED is lit up to dazzle everyone around you while you wave the Vivaz around in search of a good snap.

It’s an insane setup – I can only think that the designers of the Vivaz reasoned that the sensor’s low light performance was so good that flash wouldn’t often be needed. Which in a sense is true. But it’s not going to stop you cursing those same designers when you’re standing outside the pub at closing time, trying to get a photo of your new found drinking friends. And have to fumble inside ‘Settings|Photo’ to turn ‘Light’ on, followed shortly by your probably inebriated friends squinting painfully into your video light and looking like they’re having a very bad time indeed.

I’m sure that Sony Ericsson can fix this in firmware, but the current situation is very disappointing.

Video capture is the Vivaz’s real party trick though, being the first phone in the world to feature continuous autofocus, as far as I know, and certainly the first to combine that with full HD (1280 by 720 pixels, aka ‘720p’) recording. This results in an incredible 100MB or so of footage per minute – in a real world environment, you’re probably going to have to ‘up’ your microSD card size if you want to be ready for serious video. This is one area where the lack of a mass memory disk is really noticed – a 16GB internal disk would make all the difference in terms of capacity and usability, with your usual 8 or 16GB for music and podcasts (etc) on microSD. Ah well. Another compromise by Sony Ericsson, I feel.

There’s a compilation of my 720p footage below, firstly in reduced/embedded (VGA) YouTube format – click on it and then on ‘Watch on YouTube’. Once on YouTube, select ‘720p’ and then go full-screen. Captured videos have now got too large for simply embedding in normal web pages! 😎 I’ve also given you a link to the ‘raw’ (edited) HD clip below the embed. Just right-click that to download. It’s not raw footage from the Vivaz, as it has been assembled from several clips, but it’s as close as you’ll get to seeing raw quality. Anyway, YouTube or .MOV download – take your pick now!

So, start watching above and click through to ‘Watch on YouTube’ at the highest quality you can – OR…

…Right click here to download the 132MB .MOV version, for playing in Quicktime/Nero/your favourite media player

Video quality is obviously some way off that of a traditional HD camcorder, but then we’re talking about a tiny lens. Some of my test clips have small stutters where frames were dropped – this is the sort of thing that would get smoothed out in future firmwares – hopefully. Capturing and encoding almost 2MB of video per secondusing just a phone processor and electronics is obviously not a trivial task – but the Vivaz is very, very close to doing a good job here.

Aside from raw resolution, the Vivaz’s main party trick is the unique continuous auto-focus. I’ve written about this before, but let me summarise. Most phones simply shoot with infinite focus, with the result that close up objects (pets, people) are somewhat blurry. A few phones (e.g. N95, N82, N86, i8910 HD in the Symbian world) shoot with a ‘preset-focus’, i.e. focus is set to a metre or two, with enough depth of field in good light that stuff in the distance is also crisp enough. And a few phones (e.g. Apple iPhone 3GS, Nokia N900) use ‘pre-focus’, wherein you focus at the start of a video clip and this is then maintained throughout capture. This works well in some cases, but has the obvious disadvantage that when you start filming on one subject and then pan away you can end up with terrible results.

So, going to full autofocus is something smartphone cinematographers like myself have been waiting for with baited breath. And on the whole, I’ve not been disappointed. As you’ll see from the footage above, refocussing is as quick as many standalone camcorders and about as reliable. And makes the Vivaz stand out as a great video capture device, with the only negative being the poor contrast of the display outdoors, as mentioned in part 1 of this review. Not being able to see what you’re shooting in bright sunlight is a problem. Oh for a transflective screen, Sony Ericsson….

In poor light, there’s the same somewhat anaemic LED ‘Light’ featured in the stills camera, again guaranteed to make all your subjects squint(!) Good as the sensor is in the Vivaz, the laws of physics dictate that a phone-mounted sensor won’t be able to keep quality high when there’s not enough light to gather in each 1/25th of a second (i.e. per frame). Still, as with the Nokia N86, at least you’ll get a video at night, whereas most phone cameras would end up shooting dark grey subjects on a black background.

In summary, the camera functions do justice to the Vivaz’s marketing and, provided the rest of the hardware and software appeals, mean that this is a natural choice for anyone keen on capturing stills and video.
Pros:

Great stills quality in good or indifferent light

Good camera interface with cutting edge options, including touch-to-focus and smile detection

Good 720p video (for a phone), with really usable continuous autofocus
Cons:

No camera glass protection

No conventional LED flash for low light stills

Choice of screen tech means that it’s hard to see what you’re shooting when the sun’s out

Next is a look at the Vivaz’s custom homescreen and media suite in part 3 of this extended review, followed by a look at its use as a general smartphone, looking at its apps and idiosyncrasies, in the final part 4.

 Source : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/Sony_Ericsson_Vivaz-part_2_camera_and_camcorder.php

Sony Ericsson Vivaz (2)

Introduction

Sony Ericsson is an alliance of two tech giants and with phones like the Vivaz it shows. It’s a gadget all the way, one that will galvanize geeks and charm the regular user.

Sony Ericsson Vivaz official photos

A whole bunch of point-and-shoot cameras today boast 720p video recording, but are they not an endangered species feeling enormous pressure on both sides? For one, there are compact video recording DSLRs pushing down with competitive price tags, and then cameraphones are eating into compact camera territory with comparable still image resolution and video capture.

Eight megapixel still images and 720p video with continuous auto focus make the Sony Ericsson Vivaz a predator of point-and-shoot cameras. The Vivaz is not just a cameraphone though, it’s a smartphone as well – a tricked out Symbian running on a 720MHz CPU with a 3.2” nHD display to show it all off. That’s all in a package more compact than any combination of a stand-alone camera and a phone you can think of.

High-end smartphones have a long history of trading compact size for cramming in one feature more than the competition. The Sony Ericsson Vivaz strikes a perfect balance between being compact and feature-full – great news for anyone who doesn’t appreciate the recent craze of smartphones the size of a table… umm… tablet.
Key features
3.2″ 16M-color resistive touchscreen of 640 x 360 pixel resolution
8 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 and GPS with A-GPS
microSD card slot (up to 16GB, 8GB card in the box)
Built-in accelerometer
Turn-to-mute
TV out
Stereo FM Radio
microUSB and stereo Bluetooth v2.0
Web browser has full Flash support
Preinstalled Wisepilot navigation software
Office document viewer
Decent audio quality
Main disadvantages
No camera lens protection
No auto mode for the flash/video light
LED flash not powerful enough
The S60 5th edition UI isn’t to the best in class standards
No proximity sensor sensor to lock the screen during a call
No DivX or XviD support out-of-the-box
No smart or voice dialing
No office document editing (without a paid upgrade)
No stereo speakers
No digital compass (magnetometer)
Videocalling uses only the main camera (no secondary one)

The feature list leaves very little to complain about, so is it time retire your old compact camera and make the jump the Vivaz? That’s what we’ll try to find out. As for its performance as a smartphone the list of key features suggests smooth sailing most of the way.

How the Sony Ericsson Vivaz stacks up against he competition

Hold on to your hats folks, we’re jumping into the hardware part of this review.

Sony Ericsson Vivaz 360-degree spin

At 107 x 51.7x 12.5 mm the Sony Ericsson Vivaz is smaller than it appears in the photos – it will slip right into any pocket. It tips the scales at the neat 97 grams and that’s quite an advantage over the majority of competitors. For its impressive list of features, it’s a very compact phone.

The recent trend in Sony Ericsson design – the curved back – makes another appearance on the Vivaz. It helps the phone fit snugly in your palm, and the device feels even more compact and friendly.

Design and construction

The design of the Sony Ericsson Vivaz follows in the footsteps of the Symbian S60 5th edition phones that came before it. A touchscreen with nHD resolution (360 x 640 pixels) and three buttons bellow – the menu key in the middle, call keys on the sides.

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz shares a lot of DNA with the Satio and it looks it, but the top and bottom are curved, which breaks away from the rectangular front of the Satio. By the way, we were amazed by the uncanny resemblance with LG Viewty Smart. That’s looks though, the Vivaz feel is indeed superior.

The Vivaz comes in four color versions: Silver Moon, Cosmic Black, Galaxy Blue, Venus Ruby. We’re having the pleasure of the Silver Moon variety.

The body of the Vivaz is almost entirely made of plastic but this phone is among the rare few that don’t make us miss metal so badly. Metal would have brought up the weight too – at 97 grams it’s one of the lightest phones with a display of 3” or more.

Most of the front of the Vivaz is taken up by the 3.2″ touchscreen with a resolution of 640 x 360 pixels. The resistive unit supports up to 16M colors and is undoubtedly one of the highlights of the device. It has nice picture quality with excellent contrast for a TFT unit.

The touchscreen excels in terms of image quality • the human curvature design philosophy in action

Resistive displays generally need more pressure to get a click registered. As we found out though, the Vivaz screen response is excellent. The resistive technology is certainly not a drawback here.

Unfortunately, the sunlight legibility is poor – the Vivaz does slightly better than the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, which has a screen with the same size, resolution and touch technology.

The earpiece is at the top, along with an ambient light sensor. There’s no proximity sensor or an auto-locking feature, so the display is always susceptible 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 but still usable. At least they blend quite nicely with the overall design.

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

The left side of the Sony Ericsson Vivaz features the 3.5mm audio jack at the very top, a microUSB port just bellow it and the loudspeaker a bit further down. The microUSB port is covered by a plastic flap. The Vivaz, along with the XPERIAs, seems to have broken the FastPort curse.

3.5mm jack and microUSB port score two points for convergence

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. Between the volume rocker and the shutters, there’s an otherwise hidden LED that flashes when you turn the camera on in either mode. Above the volume rocker is another light that shines red while the phone is charging.

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 is placed at the top. As on any other Symbian handset, you can also use the power key for locking the phone (in this case double clicking the power key is enough), switching profiles or handling the memory card. All there is at the bottom is the lanyard eyelet and a mouthpiece.

The power/lock key is on top • the lanyard attaches at the bottom

The back of the Sony Ericsson Vivaz reveals its standout feature – the camera. The 8MP lens is unusually placed almost in the middle of the phone and is left completely unprotected. There is a LED flash, the main purpose of which is to serve as a video light. A small red light next to the camera blinks during recording.

The placement of the camera is uncommon but there’s a very good reason for putting it where it is. You can hold the Sony Ericsson Vivaz very comfortably with two hands without risk of smudging the lens with your fingers.

The star of the show: 8-megapixel autofocus camera with 720p video capability

Removing the battery cover on the Vivaz reveals the 1200 mAh Li-Po EP500 battery (the bulkier Satio had a 1000 mAh one).

We are yet to test its performance properly, and we’ll update this part of the review soon.

The microSD card slot is below the battery cover, though not under the battery itself. The Vivaz comes with an 8GB microSD card in the package and supports up to 16GB cards. The SIM card slot is here too – the two card compartments flank the battery. The SIM slot solution is simple – you can just slide the card in and out.

Taking a peek inside the Vivaz

The black plastic around the display and the display itself will quickly become a fingerprint mess. The plastic on the back is glossy too but on the Silver Moon prints are as good as invisible. The other color versions don’t fare as well however, especially the Cosmic Black, as we were able to confirm ourselves.

The plastic on the sides of the Sony Ericsson Vivaz appears black, but it’s actually dark blue (it’s blue in all but the Venus Ruby version) and reflects the light in an interesting way as you tilt the phone.

The Vivaz is very compact – it’s smaller than the Samsung S8000 Jet but packs a slightly bigger display as the bezel around the screen is quite thin. All the controls are easily reachable and despite being quite thin, they should be easy enough to use even if you have big fingers.

The curved back of the Sony Ericsson Vivaz lets it sit more naturally in the hand but it’s not too pronounced so it still fits well into pockets.

Sony Ericsson Vivaz in the hand

The build quality is solid enough, but there’s a noticeable gap between the display glass and the sides of the phone that quickly accumulates dust. All in all, it’s a well-built handset using quality plastics. Compact and lightweight, the Vivaz is a very friendly device, and beautifully styled too.

You won’t believe the Vivaz skill next to big guys like the iPhone and the Samsung Omnia HD

Neat and stylish UI

Sony Ericsson Vivaz runs the Symbian OS 5th edition but you’d never tell by just looking at the homescreen. It’s quite different from how other manufacturers see the touch-operated Symbian. In a nutshell, if you are familiar with the Satio, Vivaz won’t be a surprise.

For starers, we’ve prepared a short video demo of the Vivaz user interface. It should give you a better idea of most of the changes introduced by Sony Ericsson.

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 tab – 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 tab. Alternatively, horizontal finger sweeps can be used to navigate the tabs. The transition itself is visually pleasing with its 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 is no home tab this time, you can show or hide the status window with a hit on the End key. At the bottom of the screen you get the operator name, time and date (though time is also visible in the status row on top) and music controls. The music controls act as a shortcut to the music player and if there’s a song playing it will display track info (with album art) and basic player controls. There are four additional shortcuts at the bottom – Dialer, Media, Messaging and Web search.

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 assign 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 tab 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 throughout the interface.

Next up is the Shortcuts option , which puts a list of eight shortcuts on your tab – 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 the third option displays running water as an interactive (accelerometer-based) animation.

The final one is the Twitter option, which speaks for itself. It’s a homescreen Twitter tab allowing you to read or post tweets on your profile. We wish there was a Facebook option as well, but who know, perhaps developers will be able to answer to that and add many more.

Shortcuts • Picture • Flow • Twitter tab

The Vivaz main menu is more standard – there’s a choice between grid and list arrangement, and by default the shortcuts are arranged so that they 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.
Telephony still needs smart dialing

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

The two things the phone lacks are Smart dialing and voice dialing. These two are included in other versions of Symbian and should have been available here.

The dial pad

Form the options menu you can find more settings like hold call, mute, lock screen and keys, switch to video call, new call, etc.

Thanks to the built-in accelerometer you can silence an incoming call on the phone by simply flipping it over.

Unfortunately, your screen doesn’t switch off during a call, because 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. The handset didn’t perform too well scored a Below average mark meaning we have seen (and heard) much better. 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
Sony Ericsson Vivaz 64.8 59.8 69.1 Below Average
Acer neoTouch 64,6 65,7 75,8 Average
Nokia 5800 XpressMusic 75.7 66.5 68.5 Good
Sony Ericsson Satio 71.8 66.1 78.2 Good
Samsung M8910 Pixon12 75.7 72.8 77.3 Very Good
HTC Touch HD 77,7 73,7 76,7 Excellent

Phonebook is typical Symbian

Sony Ericsson Vivaz 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

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).
Excellent messaging

The messaging menu is yet another part of the Symbian S60 UI that hasn’t been modified at all since the Nokia 5800, apart from some minor reskinning.

Sony Ericsson Vivaz supports all common message types – SMS, MMS and email. They all share a common intuitive editor which by this point should be quite familiar. When composing an SMS, a counter is displayed of characters left up to a limit of 160. An indicator in brackets shows the number of separate parts the message will be divided into for sending.

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 uses a common intuitive editor for all your messages

The Vivaz also features a dedicated audio message recorder. Much like with Symbian S60 v3.2, you can either record the message on the spot or use a sound clip from the phone memory.

You can activate delivery reports – they come up on the screen as simple pop ups and are automatically saved in a dedicated messaging folder after that.

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. 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 with a screen resolution like this, reading emails on the device is a real pleasure.
The text input options cover everything

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz offers a complete selection of input methods. The handset has a standard alphanumeric on-screen keypad in both portrait and landscape mode.

The alphanumeric keypad is available in both portrait and landscape

It definitely cannot be a match for any hardware keyboard but the Vivaz full QWERTY fares 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, but we do not consider this much of a disadvantage.

We are happy with the virtual QWERTY keyboard

There is also a mini version of the QWERTY keyboard which is only good for stylus use, typing with fingers is possible but it’s a real test of your patience. Its main advantage is that it takes little space on the screen and can be moved around so it doesn’t block your view of things.

The mini QWERTY has limited use

Finally, the Sony Ericsson Vivaz offers handwriting recognition and actually does a rather decent job of it, recognizing almost all the letters we scribbled in the box. You can improve performance by taking the handwriting training – this is where you actually show the handset how you write each different letter.

The handwriting recognition worked pretty well for us

File manager

The Symbian file management system has been top notch for quite a while now, and it’s difficult to imagine what needs to change. The application can basically do anything you can think of with your files – moving, copying renaming, sorting or sending – you name it. You can also password-protect your memory card if you see fit.

The file manager has extensive functionality

Searching for a specific file or directory is also available on the phone. All you need to remember is a part of the desired name and where it was located (phone memory or memory card) Vivaz will find it for you in no time. There’s also a dedicated Search app, which searches through more than just files – it will sift through your notes, contacts, pretty much anything on the phone.
Media center: Sony Ericsson know their drill

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz Media center is a replica of what you usually find on the company’s feature phones (and Sony Playstations, 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 main media center 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.

The media center in portrait and landscape mode

Image gallery

The photo gallery is the same as in the Satio 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 a joy with the Vivaz, 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. The selected photo expands smoothly to fill the screen.

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.

Walkman on Symbian really works

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz 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.

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

Strangely enough, the Vivaz offered neither equalizers nor alternative visualizations.

Video player plays HD, but doesn’t have DivX/XviD support

The video player on the Sony Ericsson Vivaz has pretty limited functionality compared to the one found on the company’s features phones. It has neither slow-mo playback nor screenshot capabilities.

Our real grudge with the video player however is that there’s no DivX and XviD support – what can we say, LG and Samsung handsets have definitely spoiled us.

With the missing support for the extremely popular codecs, either you’ll have to buy a new application for video playback or you’ll have to convert all your videos by using MediaGo (with all the imposed limitations).

The video player could have used DivX support

When it comes to the watching experience itself, the Vivaz is nothing short of flawless. High resolution, excellent image quality and 16:9 aspect ratio make for a really nice video combo indeed.

FM radio

The integrated FM radio of the Sony Ericsson Vivaz has memory for 20 stations and dones not support RDS. 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
Decent audio quality

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz isn’t the loudest of them handset as far as headphones volume is concerned. However when subjected to our traditional audio quality test it showed a decent overall performance with even a few excellent marks here and there.

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

The cut-off extreme bass frequencies are the only slight shortfall of the Vivaz frequency response. However it is excellent for the rest of the audible range so 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 +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 vs Samsung i8910 Omnia HD

Vivaz can snap some nice shots

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz packs an 8-megapixel camera and is capable of taking photos of up to 3264 x 2448 pixels. It also sports a LED flash, but its serves video better than the still images.

The Vivaz camera interface is reasonably comfortable with the viewfinder occupying only the central part of the screen when you select regular 4:3 aspect ratio. When shooting in 16:9 aspect ratio, however, the whole display is put to use from side to side.

On the right side of the viewfinder there are five shortcuts. Those cover Scenes, Shoot mode, Focus settings, Exposure compensation and Auto mode. When you select Auto mode the handset takes care of applying the most appropriate scene settings for your photos.

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.

A high-end cameraphone, the Sony Ericsson Vivaz naturally comes with image geo-tagging too. There is also face and smile-detection, as well as panorama mode and Touch capture. In fact, its options resemble the Satio features.

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 will automatically focus on it and take the shot.

We like the idea of two separate shutter keys too – for taking photos and capturing videos. The only disadvantage is the slight risk of hitting the wrong one and missing an interesting moment.

Image quality

Sony Ericsson Vivaz produces splendid photos. The colors are vibrant and rich (too bad we don’t have the weather to prove it), the amount of resolved detail is very good and the noise levels are low.

There is no over sharpening or purple fringing. Had the amount of resolved detail and contrast been just a tad more, we surely would’ve called it the ultimate camera on a phone.

Here go the Sony Ericsson Vivaz samples.

Sony Ericsson Vivaz camera samples

Synthetic resolution

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

Sony Ericsson Vivaz resolution chart photo • 100% crops

Vivaz edges out Omnia HD

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz captures 720p videos at 24 fps, venturing to kick the Samsung Omnia HD out of its complacency.

Probably the best new feature of the Vivaz is the continuous auto focus during video recording. That’s definitely a first for any cameraphone and it allows it to act just like a dedicated video camera. We’ve compiled a demo video to show you the benefits of the technology. Hello, macro videos!

A really positive thing is that the video framerate is steady, never dropping below 24 frames per second. If you remember, in most of the videos the Omnia HD was obviously struggling to reach the desired 24 frames.

Many users are concerned about the difference between the 24fps and 30fps. The truth is both are equally fine and if you see the same footage shot at both framerates, chances are you’re going to like the 24fps one better. All cinema movies (including the blockbuster Avatar) are shot at 24fps so watching those looks more natural. Bear in mind though that currently YouTube converts all uploaded videos to 29.97 fps, so uploading to YouTube won’t yield the best possible result.

We know what you are about to ask, so here it is in plain language: yes, we think that once the contrast is fixed, the Vivaz videos will outdo those by Omnia HD.

Sony Ericsson Vivaz vs. Samsung Omnia HD 100% video crop

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz has an edge over Omnia HD in audio recording too. Currently, the Vivaz videos use AAC audio with 48kHz sampling rate, while those by the Omnia HD have a sampling rate of 16kHz. And you can definitely tell the difference.

Here’s a direct comparison of the videos recorded by Sony Ericsson Vivaz and the Samsung Omnia HD to give you a better idea. Plus it’s the only full-res video sample of the Vivaz that we’ll publish due to the large file size.

Sony Ericsson Vivaz video sample | Samsung i8910 Omnia HD video sample
Vivaz HD video has its own flaws though

The quality of the Sony Ericsson Vivaz videos is nice with reasonably well-resolved detail and faithful colors. Still there are a few things to nitpick about.

Of course, the Vivaz is still not a completely ready product, so improvements to video recording may as well be under way. But here’s our two cents the way we see it now.

First of all, the videos definitely need some increase in contrast. Slightly higher resolved detail is another thing, but it’s optional since we guess increasing the micro contrast and adding some sharpening may add for a subjective feel of added resolution. Finally, we would definitely appreciate a bit pimped up colors – currently they look washed out at times.

The last bugger that we’ll mention is the nasty rolling shutter effect and unfortunately, a fix for that is highly unlikely. At times the jello-like line skewing effect makes videos look like shot by a really cheap camera.

The rolling shutter effect in one of the Vivaz still shots
A bunch of Vivaz HD video samples

Here are some other Sony Ericsson Vivaz camera video samples that we’ve uploaded to YouTube due to their large filesize:

Connectivity is full-suite

Sony Ericsson Vivaz is well versed in connectivity – all contemporary means of data transfer are supported.

Starting with the basics, there’s quad-band GSM and EDGE support, as well as 3G network compatibility. The Vivaz has dual-band 900/2100 MHz support for worldwide coverage, as well as an American version at 850/1900/2100 MHz. Data speeds reach up to 10.2Mbps HSDPA and 2Mbps HSUPA.

Local connectivity offers the obligatory Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP. Vivaz also comes with Wi-Fi, which includes DLNA support. The wired connectivity relies on the microUSB port, a real advantage over the Satio’s FastPort.

Sony Ericsson are keen to jump ship recently with microSD cards, not Memory Sticks. The card slot on the Vivaz is hot-swappable, but it’s hidden under the battery cover. It supports cards with a capacity of up to 16GB (it comes with an 8GB card in the box), which is more free space than we’ve ever needed.
The web browser needs more work

Sony Ericsson Vivaz uses the S60 5th edition browser and starts up with the typical Sony Ericsson homepage.

It has quite a few shortcomings in usability 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.

Viewing a page full screen or bringing up the minimap requires two taps, which is exactly a click more than it should have been. And 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 that really makes logging online that much easier on a device without a physical keyboard.

Finally, the web browser has support for both Flash and Java, which means that you can enjoy flash videos straight in your browser without having to use the mobile versions of sites like YouTube. Just bear in mind that it’s not Flash 9.4 like on Nokia N900, but Flash Lite instead so exceptions are to be expected.

In terms of speed the browser performs very well but when viewing a YouTube video it would often show a “memory low” warning. The videos still played smoothly though.

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

Mobile office is also highly functional with preinstalled viewers for Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. The PDF viewer was preinstalled on our unit but it’s only a 15-day trial version again (duh!).

Only viewing of documents is supported out of the box

Unfortunately, editing documents is not supported on the included Quickoffice version. If you would like editing enabled you will have to buy the additional license.

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

We have to admit though that the calculator is much more comfortable to operate with fingers than with a D-pad, almost as if it was designed for such use from the very beginning. Now let’s just hope new non-touchscreen devices get something better.

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

Few applications

The preinstalled applications on the Sony Ericsson Vivaz 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 need to be a white-collar worker to use that. You may just as well sync your phone to the Google could 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 next two apps don’t come preinstalled in your phone, but their installation packages are found on your memory card. Both are Symbian native apps. The Water Level is a pretty accurate leveling tool with various options. World Mate is a travel advisor for weather, flights, etc.

There’s the Facebook app too, which speaks for itself.

Water Level • World Mate • Facebook
Wisepilot to guide your way

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz 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 but we had to go out into an open area. It wouldn’t get a lock on the balcony of our office.

The Vivaz is equipped with the Wisepilot navigation software and 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 interactively 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
Two games on board

There are only two games preinstalled and despite the catchy names and looks, they really aren’t so cool. The first one is called SSX 3 and is an accelerometer-controlled snow-board racer. There are four virtual buttons too for jumping, strafing, etc.

The other game is Rally Masters, with the accelerometer again in charge of steering and just one virtual key for braking.

SSX 3 • Rally Masters

Conclusion

Sony Ericsson have been limping on profits lately but their ambitions seem to not have suffered one bit. There is the Satio, now the Vivaz and with the XPERIA X10 on its way, the company is gaining a firm foothold in the high-end segment.

Some people scoff at the sight of Symbian but Sony Ericsson’s work on the homescreen and their signature media menu, you can spend quite some time using the phone before you actually come down to the slightly off-putting S60 5th UI.

The size of the display might seem inadequate next to the awe-inspiring HTC HD2. The Vivaz though was built to be compact and screen size was dictated by pocketability, not the other way around.

The interface and screen size are pretty much the things for anyone to complain about. The display is sensitive, the CPU is speedy and the camera is excellent – and hard to beat really. So, the phone is great, but this doesn’t mean much until you have a good look at the competition as well.

Comparisons between the Sony Ericsson Vivaz and the Samsung i8910 Omnia HD are inevitable. Symbian and 720p video make the two the bitterest of rivals. Samsung have had plenty of time to chisel out some of the problems the Omnia HD had at launch – audio quality and framerate issues in videos. The audio they fixed early on by switching to AAC, but video is still struggling to make it to 24 frames per second.

The Vivaz has its issues as well, but at least it’s capable of delivering all 24 fps – and the HD video recording is quite promising. Sony Ericsson’s take on Symbian feels more refined too – the homescreens are simple to use but offer all the basic functionality you need and we always liked the custom media menu – especially in its touch-enabled form. Plus the Vivaz feels zippier than the Omnia HD.

Samsung i8910 Omnia HD

If you haven’t bought an HDTV yet, then we’ll suggest you look at the Sony Ericsson Satio. It won’t capture 720p video (just VGA@30fps) but it does 12MP still shots. It offers most of the same functionality as the Vivaz, but on a 3.5″ screen. It still lives in a FastPort world though, so finding a good pair of headphones might be a problem.

Sony Ericsson Satio

The Vodafone 360 H1 by Samsung will perhaps intrigue the more adventurous among our readers with its OS. It’s one of the few phones around with a LiMo OS (an open source mobile phone based on Linux, and no, it’s not Android). The hardware of the 360 H1 lists an AMOLED 3.5″ capacitive touchscreen with 480×800 pixels resolution, a Cortex A8 600MHz CPU, a 5MP camera, 16GB of internal storage, Wi-Fi and GPS. We haven’t had a chance of testing that in person so we can’t pass any judgments yet.

Vodafone 360 H1

For compact touchscreen goodness, the Samsung S8000 Jet is a must-see. The screen is slightly smaller at 3.1″ but 480 x 800 pixels make some difference, especially that it’s an AMOLED screen. You won’t find pixel density like that elsewhere. It’s no contest when it comes to the camera though – the Jet has only 5 megapixels and D1@30fps to offer. And while the Jet has SatNav software and a document viewer it doesn’t have the flexibility of a smartphone.

Samsung S8000 Jet

Finally, a stroll around our rumor mill reveals two more potential contenders – the Samsung M8920 with its 3x optical zoom and the HTC Bravo. The quickest way to describe the Samsung M8920 is that it is a 720p-capable 12MP point-and-shoot camera with phone functionality.

The HTC Bravo is more orthodox – it’s an un-Googled Nexus One with a little bit more perks. It runs Android, has a 3.7″ AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU and its 5MP camera is rumored to capture 720p video.

Samsung M8920 • HTC Bravo

It’s safe to say there is no phone just like the Sony Ericsson Vivaz – the competition is a thing or two short or has a thing or two in its favor. For a bigger screen, you’d have to give up either the smooth video recording or go with an OS that barely ranks in terms of market share. The other option is to wait for phones that haven’t even been officially confirmed yet.

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz design team knew what they wanted right from the start and they have achieved their goal. When the Vivaz hits the stores, there will be a line a mile long of Sony Ericsson fans queing for it but, more importantly, there will probably be quite a few new converts as well.

Source : http://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_vivaz-review-447p10.php

Sony Ericsson Vivaz

A cliche, but the photos of the Sony Ericsson Vivaz really don’t do it justice. It’s smaller than you might think, smaller even than Nokia’s diminutive 5530, despite having a 3.2″ TFT screen. Sony Ericsson have made the utmost of the space available, especially so when you look at the styling. The company calls it ‘human curvature’, wherein almost every edge on the device is naturally curved to mimic the curves in nature and to sit well in the human hand. This may sound a little over the top, but this is the nicest smartphone to hold in the world. By some margin.

Adding style are twin translucent side panels – these catch the light in a rather beautiful way – top marks, here, Sony Ericsson. The tapered top and bottom, plus the overall weight of only 97g(!), mean that the device feels very slight and you wouldn’t guess that it housed a very powerful processor and camera. The size and weight are so slight that, in truth, after slipping the Vivaz into the front pocket of my jeans, I have (several times) been caught out wondering where the phone was and realising it had been with me all along. There haven’t been many smartphones that you could say that about.

Learning lessons from the ill-fated Satio, the buttons and general trim are much better finished – the Vivaz definitely does not look cheap.

Of special note in the Vivaz’s hardware are (working my way around the device anti-clockwise):
The power/profiles button on the top – some people say that this is too easily pressed by accident, but I think it’s perfectly placed and weighted.

The 3.5mm audio/TVout jack is beautifully positioned, snug in the top left corner, it’s something of an electronic miracle how Sony Ericsson managed to fit it there at all

The microUSB port has a tethered plastic cover, which does the job but part of it sticks out when closed – and all of it gets in the way when trying to plug in a cable. If this was my Vivaz, I’d be tempted to tear off the cover and leave the port ‘commando’…

A tiny and rather pointless speaker port. I say pointless because covering it up has very little effect – the actual (mono) speaker is deep inside the device and the sound gets out in a dozen ways, it seems.

A completely pointless little plastic tab – it sticks out for no reason and all I can think of is that it’s there to give extra finger grip.

Three physical control buttons – call/menu/hangup – these work much like the trio on other S60 5th Edition phones – they’re fairly insubstantial but then again at least they’re buttons and not just touch-sensitive areas, as on some other modern phones.

Stills camera shutter button – a long press on this and, even when keylocked, the Camera app pops up on screen. It’s not the largest shutter button ever, but it does the job well, in the usual focus, then press further to take the shot fashion.

Video camera button – a Vivaz innovation. As with stills, a long press on this and the Camera pops up, but in camcorder mode. And what a camcorder – but more of that later.

Volume up/down buttons, doubling as zoom controls in the camera modes (bad move – never use digital zoom on these devices – unless you have a Nokia N86, which does things differently) and in the media viewer suite.

The Vivaz really is a nice little package – it sits in the hand so well, I instinctively felt that this is how a phone – or indeed a smartphone – should look and feel – Sony Ericsson has got this aspect 100% right. To be fair, there are a few minor negatives on the hardware side too that I have to mention at this point:
The screen’s TFT, meaning that it’s nice and bright indoors but isn’t brilliant on a bright cloudy day and then fades into nothingness when out in direct sunlight. Yes, I know there are always compromises with screen technology, but come on – elder sister Satio had a transflective screen that was at least vaguely usable in sunlight – why the change in screen tech? After all, the Vivaz is just as much focussed(!) on photography (both stills and video) as the Satio, and yet you can’t actually see what you’re shooting most of the time. Manufacturers of camera phones should start the design process with ‘OK, let’s make sure that on nice sunny days when users are going to want to use this device, that the display is visible’. Which means going down the transflective route, in good company with the likes of the Apple iPhone, Nokia N97, Satio, and most older Nokias.

The touch screen’s resistive rather than capacitive – this is a debate that I’ve gone over before – both have their pros and cons, so I’m not going to pronounce ultimate judgement, other than to note that the resistive touch layer probably plays its part in reducing screen visibility. It has been noted by others that the use of a glass (rather than plastic) substrate for the screen makes a positive difference, but to me it’s marginal at best. And there’s still the squishy outer layer etc.

As with the Nokia N97 mini, the 3.2″ screen size is just about perfect for nHD (640 by 360 pixels) screens and S60 5th Edition. You get a display that can be traversed if needed by your thumb, enabling one-handed use in traditional phone manner.

Under the hood, the Vivaz is well specified, with a 720 MHz processor, with PowerVR SGX graphics built-in, making it powerful enough to handle both playback of various video streams and also to handle captured HD video. There’s a 77MB internal (C:) disk, of which roughly 55MB are free to the user after the initial switch on. This isn’t massive, but given that we’ve not got numerous Nokia addons insisting on installing themselves into C:, this system disk storage should be fine for most users. There’s no mass memory disk, sadly – one positive that we’ve come to expect from recent Nokia and Samsung Symbian phones. All you get here is a microSD slot, albeit loaded up with a 8GB card out of the box.

RAM is great, as on the Satio – there’s over 150MB free after booting, so low memory will at least never be a problem on the Vivaz, unlike every Nokia S60 5th Edition device so far [mutters….]

Powering the Vivaz is a 1200mAh cell, i.e. 20% more capacity than the Satio’s battery. I’ve not had the Vivaz long enough to test this fully, but I’d estimate the battery will be more than up to the job. After all, you’re not going to have hour-long web browsing sessions or watch feature films on this thing. The Vivaz is about media capture and fun.

Creating a piece of hardware with so many curves must have produced some production headaches – you can get an idea of some of the complexities by taking the back off (though it’s hard to appreciate it all in a 2D photo). The microSD card is unusually placed but easy to extract when needed. The camera glass is that of the camera itself, since this ‘pokes through’ the back cover, avoiding having yet another layer of plastic between the outside world and the camera lens.

Ah yes, the camera, undoubtedly the highlight of the Vivaz – even over the human curvature design. The lack of camera glass protection is a little worrying, as is the prominent place on the device’s back, but that aside there’s very little complain about here. The 8 megapixel photos are, in good light, superb, as you can see here (click through to enlarge or download the original JPG):

There will be more camera samples in part 2 of this review. Photos in poor light are less impressive, as you’d expect. Insert my usual need-for-Xenon-flash-rant in here…. But the sensor in the Vivaz does a lot better than most phones I’ve tried. Here’s a sample taken in artificial light, the room bulb was only 60W, and yet the digital noise is very low…

(Again, click through to download or enlarge)

However, the otherwise excellent camera interface lets the Vivaz down horribly once things get even darker. Unbelievably, there’s no traditional flash here at all. The LED is pitched as a ‘light’, the idea being that you’re in a dark place so you delve into the menus to turn on the ‘Light’ setting, at which point the LED is lit up to dazzle everyone around you while you wave the Vivaz around in search of a good snap.

It’s an insane setup – I can only think that the designers of the Vivaz reasoned that the sensor’s low light performance was so good that flash wouldn’t often be needed. Which in a sense is true. But it’s not going to stop you cursing those same designers when you’re standing outside the pub at closing time, trying to get a photo of your new found drinking friends. And have to fumble inside ‘Settings|Photo’ to turn ‘Light’ on, followed shortly by your probably inebriated friends squinting painfully into your video light and looking like they’re having a very bad time indeed.

I’m sure that Sony Ericsson can fix this in firmware, but in the meantime, as Doctor Who would say, ‘Keep out of the Shadows!’…

Video capture is the Vivaz’s real party trick though, being the first phone in the world to feature continuous autofocus, as far as I know, and certainly the first to combine that with full HD (1280 by 720 pixels) recording. This results in an incredible 100MB or so of footage per minute – in a real world environment, you’re probably going to have to up your microSD card size if you want to be ready for serious video. This is one area where the lack of a mass memory disk is really noticed – a 16GB internal disk would make all the difference in terms of capacity and usability.

Initial results have been good with a few caveats. There’s a ‘raw’ HD clip below – just right-click the guinea pigs to download. Also below is the sample video I took a couple of days ago.

Video quality is obviously some way off that of a traditional HD camcorder, but then we’re talking about a tiny lens. Some of my early test clips had stutters where frames were dropped – this is the sort of thing that would get smoothed out in future firmwares – hopefully. There will, of course, be more video samples in part 2 of this review in a few days time. So watch this space.

As with the Satio, the Vivaz uses vanilla S60 5th Edition, with no Symbian-provided bells and whistles (sadly), but with a custom ‘kinetic’ front end added by Sony Ericsson. This comprises a Flash-based replacement standby theme, with example plug-ins for Twitter, media and shortcuts, plus a comprehensive (native Symbian) media suite (music, photos, videos). In addition, there are a number of application differences from the Nokia and Samsung phones we’ve been used to.

All of which I’ll come to in a lot more depth in part 3 of this review.

It’s worth noting, before I go much further, that the use of two different interfaces within the one phone (or three, if you count the homescreen) makes for a messy experience for the end user. Yes, Sony Ericsson do like to match up as much of a smartphone’s interface as possible to the look and feel of the rest of their (feature) phone range, but ultimately there’s little excuse for a degree of laziness. For example, the media suite (which works pretty well here, unlike on the bugged Satio) uses an all-black theme with animated swirls. Very pretty, but this can’t be changed, making something of a lurch when the main S60 interface is all in (for example) sunburst yellows and orange. Similarly for the Sony Ericsson homescreen theme, which also ignores the basic phone theme that’s loaded.

Then there’s the way application icons have been scattered, almost at random, in the different application folders. When you dig deeper, you realise that the distribution has been forced on Sony Ericsson by the absence of kinetic scrolling across the interface (Nokia N97-style). Not only are the static screens and fiddly scrollbars a nuisance across almost all applications, but the lack of scrolling in the application folders means that, rather than confuse the user still further, Sony Ericsson has chosen (rather crudely) to simply default all folders to 12 icons, so that, out of the box, there isn’t any need to scroll.

Going the extra mile, as Nokia did (eventually), and implementing full kinetic scrolling across the interface would have helped bridge the yawning gap between the S60 interface and the Sony Ericsson one – as would opening up the Sony Ericsson extensions to use the current S60 theme. With these two steps in place, things would look far more integrated.

Source : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/Sony_Ericsson_Vivaz-part_1_hardware_and_first_impressions.php