Sony Ericsson Vivaz

 

Small and light full-touchscreen smartphone 

 

 

 

Beautiful design, ultra small and light weight, good display quality, plenty of features, good audio quality (headphones), HD video recording with continuous autofocus

Poor interface design is frustrating, frequent application crashes, sluggish camera interface, poor implementation of flash in camera, camera quality could have been better

 

Sony Ericsson's first Symbian S60 phone was an epic disaster, at least for us. It was by far one of the most annoying phones I have ever used and the software was so badly put together that using the phone was painful. It did not even matter to us that it had a 12 megapixel camera with xenon flash with very good picture quality. The poor software made everything else irrelevant, making the phone almost unusable. Not to be deterred with failure, Sony Ericsson decided to experiment with Symbian again and came up with yet another smartphone, the Sony Ericsson Vivaz.
The Vivaz brings with it a new hardware design with features that are just a notch below than that of Satio. Okay. But the hardware wasn't much of a problem with the previous phone, it was the software. Unfortunately, Vivaz still runs on the same old Symbian S60 5th Edition operating system.

Bundle

• Sony Ericsson Vivaz
• Battery
• Charger
• Headset
• USB Cable
• Stylus
• 8GB microSD card
• User Guide

 Hardware

This is by far the most impressive aspect of the phone. The Vivaz truly has stunning looks. Sony Ericsson phones usually are good-looking, but their designers have outdone themselves with the Vivaz.

The design uses curved edges to great effect. On the sides the designers have used a semi transparent material that looks beautiful, as it reflects light in a deep shade of blue on the black, silver and blue model and a deep red on the red colored model. The sides give the phone half its appeal.

Turn the phone around and you see a beautiful curve that tapers heavily towards the top and bottom, and slightly towards the middle. It's because of this design detail that the 8 megapixel camera lens on the Vivaz is placed almost in the middle of the phone, which is where the phone is at its thickest.

The buttons for volume, video recording and camera on the right, and the power button on the top, are tastefully done in chrome, which stands out in the deep black Vivaz. Also hidden on the right side is a blue strip of light that briefly glows when you turn the camera on. The keys below the display follow the curve of the chin and are just thin lines, which blend in with the design instead of standing out. Above the 3.2" display the ambient light sensor can be seen near the top. A proximity sensor is nowhere to be seen though.

The 3.5mm headphone jack has been placed right at the edge of the left side, a fine location if your headphone cable has an L-Type jack, but not so if it has a straight jack, which would jut out.

Software

This is where things start going wrong. The Vivaz might be an improvement over the Satio but it is still nowhere close to matching the usability of phones like the iPhone or any of the Android phones. Having said that, it is nowhere near as frustrating to use as the Satio and is definitely something that you could live with once you get used to all its idiosyncrasies.

A lot has been said about Symbian S60 5th Edition OS already, so we won't go into the details. On the Nokia phones it works fairly well as Nokia has taken effort to actually improve the core OS itself by adding features like kinetic scrolling to the menu. Sony Ericsson has instead chosen to leave the OS as it is and instead tacked their own UI element on top. This mish-mash of two different interface designs leaves not only the UI but the user confused as well.

For starters there is the new home screen. You get five screens and on each of the screens you have multiple options to choose from.  By default on the leftmost screen houses all your favorite contacts, the next one is a Flash-based Twitter client, which by the way is pathetic and all it does is let you read the tweets and make them. You cannot reply to them, retweet them or do anything else for that matter. Even if you use the service casually you wouldn't want to use this app. What is worse is that it can't even remember your login and keeps logging you out.

The centre screen has a Flash animation playing, which changes orientation as you rotate the phone. It's not very interesting and I preferred having a static wallpaper instead. The fourth screen houses your photo gallery. Unfortunately, it is in portrait, which means all your landscape photographs are cropped so that only a portion of it is displayed to fill the screen. The bigger problem, however, is the scrolling animation. When you flick to scroll the images, start scrolling continuously like a film roll instead of stopping at individual images. This means you have to take extra effort to ensure that it stops at the next image if you are viewing them one by one and can't just flick it like in other phones. Videos are also displayed here but you cannot watch them here and they instead open in the media player. The next is a list of all your favorite apps, which are user customizable.

One thing common for all the five home screens is the pop-up like widget at the bottom, which has shortcuts for the phone number pad, media player, message app and search app. It also shows the current time and date. You can tap on the screen to minimize it but it appears again when you go to some app and come back to the home screen.

Apart from the default options, you can also keep one of the two Flash animations on any of the screen, one of which is a fish tank animation and the other is a classic game of Breakout; the paddle below can be controlled by moving the phone left and right. Currently these are the two only options available and if you click the option to download more you are taken to the web browser and nowhere from there. You can also have a static wallpaper or keep the screen blank.

Apart from the default Sony Ericsson home screen you can also have an option to choose from four other basic Symbian themes. First is basic, which gives you a blank home screen with just the clock. Next is full page, which gives you six home shortcuts for any app of your choice. You can also choose Finger use, which reduces the number of icons to just four but they are larger and easier to use. Lastly, you've got the Navigation bar, which places the icons in a vertical row on the left side. We did not find much use for this one. Overall my personal favorite was the full page option, which was functional without being overly fancy. I can choose any wallpaper of my choice and it would be displayed full screen with the icons over it.

After the home screen we get to the other Sony Ericsson app and that is the Media Player. It is the same one from the Satio and manages to mimic the look of the media player from other Sony Ericsson phones. It is a well designed app with fluid animations and kinetic scrolling used liberally everywhere. But that's where the problem is. This app and the home screen sticks out over the otherwise clumsy Symbian interface. There is no synergy between the default Symbian interface and Sony Ericsson's apps. Sony Ericsson has concentrated their efforts in making their own apps look good but they should have spent some more on the Symbian interface of the phone so that they go well with each other.

Simple things like kinetic scrolling would have not only made the UI more user friendly but it would have also made it less jarring for the user when he switches from the Symbian interface to the media player for example. Basic things like having the colors of the background match would have gone a long way in achieving this. Currently the media player has a black background, which remains constant no matter which theme you have set on the phone. The default Sony Ericsson themes are all black but that won't be the case for other themes that you might install. Imagine having an orange theme on your phone and then suddenly switching to the black look of the media player.

This shows the poor attention to detail and laziness on Sony Ericsson's part and makes me feel like they just concentrated on the phone's hardware and the software got a step motherly treatment. In fact in today's day and age the software plays a far bigger role than hardware. If you look underneath the software and UI of the iPhone, you will find a mediocre hardware. But why then is the phone so popular today? It's the software that does all the magic and runs the show these days and if you have good enough software people won't give a damn whether you have an 8 megapixel or 20 megapixel camera on board.

If that was not enough, the Vivaz has a tendency to crash. Countless times during the two weeks that I used the phone, applications froze inexplicably and become unresponsive. At times they would take the entire operating system down and the only solution then would be to remove and reinsert the battery and restart the phone. This continued even after we updated the phone to the latest firmware. So this leaves you with software that is not attractive, not user friendly and quite unstable. Do note that the Vivaz is definitely an improvement over the Satio, but it would take a lot more from Sony Ericsson to make their Symbian smartphones more user-friendly.

 
Music, Photos and Videos

All three of the above mentioned can be found in the media player of the Vivaz. The music player automatically scans the phone every time you start it and content added to the phone is automatically added to the library.

The music player has a very good interface design. It sorts your music into various categories and even has category for audiobooks and podcasts, although a podcast applications is not available, as it is on Nokia Symbian phones. You can create custom playlists by marking the tracks or delete them from the app itself. On the Now Paying screen you can see a large album art in the middle with the track info on top and the payback controls in the middle.

The software does not have any kind of audio customization options though and if you have a good enough pair of headphones, you wouldn't really notice the omission as the phone has excellent audio quality. Speaking of good headphones, the pair of headset that comes with the phone was absolutely pathetic. Not only did it sound rubbish but it did not even fit properly in my ears. I wonder why Sony Ericsson did not provide their set of in-ear headset with the Vivaz, considering how expensive the phone is. Even the XPERIA X10 came with a rather sad pair of headset bundled with it. In comparison the Vivaz came with high quality Bluetooth stereo headset bundled.

The phone's loudspeaker is equally bad. It's barely audible even at maximum value and is unusable for listening to music. You can listen to some podcasts or audiobooks, but even then the volume might not be sufficient.

Now let's come to the photos section of the media player. Sony Ericsson has given this section more prominence over music and videos and you can see that it is at the top of the list. Photos are categorized into camera album, web albums and any other images that you might have on your phone. The images are displayed in a grid of thumbnails, with the thumbnails for even large images being displayed pretty fast. For some strange reason, the videos taken from the camera are also displayed in the camera folder of the photo viewer, even though there is a dedicated section for them.

Unfortunately, when you open the images the same problem that fazed us on the home screen is present here as well. You cannot just swipe on the images, as they would just continue to scroll instead of stopping at the next image. Also, when you zoom into an image, the image does not start filling the screen but instead continues to occupy the same space on the screen as the completely zoomed out image did. All this makes the image viewer less than perfect.

In the videos section, the videos are categorized into camera videos, podcasts and other videos. Videos can be played full screen and you can also change their aspect ratio and zoom them to it the screen of they are small. Unfortunately, the phone does not support DivX and XviD video files. When we installed a third party software for playing them, the videos were quite jerky, which was surprising as the phone had a dedicated graphics processor. Perhaps it wasn't being used by third party software.

Battery Life

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz has a 1200 mAh Li-Polyper battery. With a couple of hours of calling, messaging,  and about five to six hours of web browsing and music playback and camera usage, mostly without flash, the Vivaz gave us a battery life of about one day. These days it is not common for smartphones to give this much battery life and I think one day is acceptable for a phone with so many features and a big touchscreen to power. Anything less and it would have been a cause for concern.

Verdict

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz is graced with a lovely design that looks and feels great in your hands. It is possibly the smallest and lightest full-touchscreen smartphone that you could buy today. It also has a fairly long specifications list, with 3G, HSDPA, GPS, Wi-Fi and an 8 megapixel camera with HD video recording and continuous autofocus being some of the highlights.

But all this is ruined somewhat by the software on the phone, which is way behind than what the competition has to offer. It makes using the phone somewhat of a chore, although you can get used to it. However, if you are a geek or a Symbian veteran then you won't really find it all that bad. But for a newbie the UI can be quite frustrating at times, especially when the applications seem to crash for no reason whatsoever. Also, if you look beyond the design, there is no particular area where the phone truly excels and it does everything half-heartedly. All this does not make the Rs. 23,000 price tag seem good value.

If I had to get a touchscreen Symbian phone, I'd rather get the Nokia N97 mini, which has similar specs as the Vivaz but instead of the 8 megapixel camera and HD video recording it has a full QWERTY keypad. Plus the N97 mini has a fairly decent camera.

If you don't want Symbian then you can get the HTC Legend for about the same price. The Legend has a fantastic aluminum unibody design along with Android 2.1 clair, which is far superior to Symbian OS. Or you can spend a couple of thousand more and get the Motorola Milestone, which is light-years ahead of the Vivaz in almost every aspect.

As you can see there are very few reasons for one to consider buying the Vivaz, except perhaps for the design. Be warned though, underneath those beautiful lines lies a messy software. Beauty, in this case, is only skin-deep.