The Sony Ericsson Vivaz – Outstanding Any Which Way You Look

The Symbian OS remains king of the hill, accounting for nearly half the world’s smartphones.  There are other highly specialized proprietary platforms like Blackberry, Samsung Bada and WebOS as well as the lackluster Windows Mobile, but they are nowhere near the market shares of a proven, stable and feature-rich Symbian.

There are some glitches and kinks but it has now achieved open status that should further enhance it.   Android might change the landscape but that won’t happen anytime soon.  Sony Ericsson has long been making upscale top-of-the-line smartphones in Symbian OS 9.4 or S60 5th edition (with the UI bundling) culminating in the awe-inspiring Satio last year.

This year, it makes another claim to the top of the Mount Olympus with its first product announcement of the year – the Sony Ericsson Vivaz.

A Vidcam with a Phone

Running on a 720 MHz Power VR SGX Graphics accelerator, the new handset carries on the tradition started with the Satio both running the Symbian S60 5th edition OS.  While the Satio has one the breakthrough 12 megapixel camera that has since been clobbered with the HTC Bravo cum Google Nexus.

The Vivaz sports a superb high definition 720p video recording at a Blu-ray quality 24 fps frame rate.  This basically puts it on a direct collision course with the Samsung Omnia HD which actually suffers in direct comparison, the M8920 as well as the HTC Bravo.

A bit tamer than the Satio in the imaging department, the Vivaz carries just 8 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash, face and smile detection, go-tagging with its GPS receiver and touch-focus.

That would be enough to permanently etch itself in the pantheon of great camera phones, but its 720p video recording with video light brings it to the level of high definition camcorders.  This makes it among the view gadgets like the HTC Bravo and the Samsung M8920 as better classified in the genre of pocketable vidcams with a phone.

A Superb Balancing Act

Those exquisite HD video recordings deserves no less than a gorgeous playback display, not via a TV out to an HDTV which it has but only at VGA resolution, but right on the handset display itself.

Not a few may be disappointed with a mere 3.2 inch wide VGA resistive touchscreen display even with a brilliant 16 million color support.  It’s still small.  Sony Ericsson could have gone the way of the HTC HD2 with a massive 4.3-inch display even with its pathetic 65k colors due to its inferior Windows Mobile OS, but its designer knew exactly how to balance features that really matter.

Thanks to its superb balance act, the Vivaz gets housed on a sleek 107 x 51.7 x 12.5mm elegant weighing at a pocket friendly 97 gram to make it the lightest handset among 3-inch display touchscreens. None of the humongous HTC HD2’s nearly doubled 157 grams and unwieldy dimensions.  And this is done while maintaining the brilliant HD colors only a Symbian OS can support at this time.

The Vivaz exhibits excellent touchscreen responsiveness despite being just resistive with onscreen haptic alphanumeric and QWERTY keys that almost rivals a tactile keyboard. There’s no need to use a stylus pen.  But this can be a disadvantage as some functions could be accidentally activated with the lack of proximity sensors to disable the screen sensitivity when held against your face in a call.

Everything else about the Sony Ericsson Vivaz, hardware and software wise, is as expected from an upscale Sony Ericsson smartphone carrying the bells and whistles like its Satio predecessor.  Like the Xperia X10, this is another handset to die for.

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