Sony Ericsson Vivaz U5

The stylish new Vivaz was only recently launched here in India. It’s designed to offer mobile camera buffs a value for their money, at least that’s what Sony Ericsson says. The Vivaz has been a much awaited handset but before you go around whipping out your wallet, here’s a closer look at the handset. It should help you make up your mind if this is the right high end camera phone for you.

Form Factor
The Human Curvature design is by far an excellent way for a handset to be designed. The Subtle curve gives the Vivaz that feel good factor you look for when holding a handset. The resistive 3.2-inch display was a bad idea. That eye-brow pencil styled stylus just dangles from the top of the handset from its tether making it quite an annoyance. It has a 3.5mm handsfree socket on one side and a micro USB port just underneath that. On the other side are the volume/zoom keys followed by two separate keys to activate the Video camera and the still. This just makes it quite easy and you can quickly start up either without worrying. A hot swap microSD card slot for the bundled 8GB card is just under the rear panel.

While it’s well crafted, lightweight and looks good in your hand, the fact that it’s made completely of plastic with little or a negligible amount of metal incorporated makes it feel a bit cheap. Nevertheless it does have a chic look too it with its dark blue sides and all black coat, but I still remain firm about it being a little bit feminine. The plastic rear panel, aside from being a superb finger print magnet will also get easily scratched if you’re constantly removing it from and placing it into your pocket.

Features and Performance
Interface
Running on a 720 MHz CPU, most of the Vivaz’s functions aren’t too slow. Scrolling through pictures and opening a few features happens quite quickly enough. However, a certain amount of lag is evident when it comes to accelerometer rotating the displays. There were also a few times when the handset simply hung when I hit the ‘back’ button in some applications. Another issue was that I heard the handset ring for at least 4 seconds before the screen would flash with the caller’s name. I’m not sure if this was a deliberate setting, but I don’t like it. The button on the top of the screen doubles up as a power key and screen lock. What was annoying was when pressed it would shoot up a list of menus that included 'Lock Screen' and the various profiles and a shut off option, if your hand slips you’ll end up shutting off the handset instead of locking the screen. It would have made more sense just having a separate screen lock switch. A few gesture based controls like turning the handset over to silence incoming calls are also present.

The Vivaz uses a Symbian Series 60, 5th edition UI which has its share of flaws. The UI is surprisingly responsive and quite finger friendly though. The desktop Standby modes include the standard S60 touchscreen options and one created just for Sony Ericsson handsets. A shortcut media bar with access to other shortcuts, including access to music you may be currently playing, is present at the bottom of the screen.

The full screen QWERTY keypad makes typing quite simple. If that doesn’t do it for you there’s a smaller one more conducive to use with a stylus. Of course you can stick to the plain old alphanumeric mode if you like. Unfortunately there’s no mode to switch automatically to the full QWERTY keypad in landscape from the other options. Handwriting recognition is also another option.

Media
The handset’s music player sadly doesn’t measure up to most of the other S60 devices out there in the world. Like the Satio that was launched months ago bearing the same UI, Sony Ericsson has clearly not thought it necessary enough to include EQ presets to help boost the audio level. As is, the volume is dreadfully low and I had to push the earphones into my ears and hold them there just to make out the lyrics of a song. For some strange reason the Vivaz, didn’t seem to work with my other set of earphones. They refused to be ‘accepted’ and audio would only stream out of the speakerphone. Thankfully the speakerphone isn’t too loud either or my fellow commuters would have had issues with that. On the plus side, the quality of audio, when I could hear it, was quite good. The FM radio worked out quite well with decent reception in most places.

Irrespective of the fact that this camera can record videos in a 720p format, it doesn’t support videos of a DivX or XviD variety. Not that that's a problem, but it would have helped boost the overall rating. iPhone sized MPEG4 videos play very well and so do standard 3GP files. It also supports TV Out. A couple of 3D games have been included and help wile away those boring commutes.

Connectivity
Handsets are getting slimmer and sleeker these days and still managing to incorporate tons of connectivity hardware. The Vivaz is no exception. It supports 3G, EDGE, Wi-Fi with DLNA capabilities for media sharing, Stereo Bluetooth, USB 2.0 and GPS with A-GPS support and Geotagging. What’s very surprising is that the handset was being pushed as a multimedia device with uploading capabilities and it has too few to count as useful.

There’s no option for viewing the location of images captured on Google Maps and there didn't seem to be any image share or upload option to upload files to blogs or Facebook, Picasa or Flickr. The same goes for videos. I was under the assumption that the gallery section of an 8MP camera phone would allow for easy upload to YouTube at the very least. That didn't seem to be there either. A mysterious Web Publishing app is preloaded that showcases items like Facebook, Picasa, YouTube, Blogger and a few others but I have no idea what they’re there for as clicking on them only brought up an error message saying in not so many words - don’t mess with this. If I tried to add another item to this list I was directed to the browser and the PlayNow section that showcased nothing useful. Presumably these are here just to let you know that you can access albums stored on these sites via the Web album option in the media gallery. There didn’t seem to be any easy way to upload to any of them. If there is, I couldn’t find it and even if the company calls me to inform me of this, not all of you would have that same privilege.
The preloaded Facebook app is quite well designed and even has its very own virtual keypad that switches from standard to QWERTY in landscape... isn’t that convenient. You can download a Gtalk app for chatting or struggle to use Sony Ericsson’s IM chat. POP and IMAP email accounts can be easily configured and the browser is one of the few things that was a non issue.

Misc. Features
Quickoffice and Adobe’s mobile PDF reader are on board in a ‘read only’ capacity though. A dictionary Alarm Clock, Calendar, Calculator, Notes and Converter are part of the basic functions that you’d expect to find. If you have RoadSync account you can use that to back up your data or use Sony Ericsson’s own sync option or any other service you like. Google’s Web search and a mobile data search are both available for online data and finding information on your handset respectively.

Camera
The main ‘focus’ of this handset is its 8MP camera. It’s loaded to the hilt with features from Face and smile detection to, a variety of scene modes, Image stabilization, auto stitch panorama and even touch focus. On the whole image quality was really quite good needless to say the camera was the handset's redeeming feature. Colors looked quite vibrant and details were quite focused for a camera phone even on closer inspection.
The handset’s Hi-Def video recording functionality also worked out quite well. Initially it was a little bit buggy but smoothened out later. After that it was a non issue.

Battery
The 1200mAh was just enough to sustain most of the Vivaz’s functions. On a single charge with a little use of the camera, calls, messages and a bit of video it ran for just about two days. Talk time ran into the 4 hour range on an average and that’s not bad at all.

The Bottom Line
It’s a good thing the price of even these ‘high-end’ camera phones have dropped to such an extent. The Vivaz comes with a price tag of just Rs. 25,695 (MRP) that includes an 8GB memory card and nothing else out of the ordinary. If it weren’t for the silly quirks that could very easily have been fixed considering their 12MP Satio has all the same flaws, the Vivaz could have been a fantastic handset. Its comfortable design is only downgraded by the plastic finish and the buggy UI takes care of any other goodness it had. Sony should just stick to their own proprietary OS and UI. The camera and battery are definite plus points but the lack of any easy to use uploading apps for images and videos is just downright insulting to today’s mobile user.

In this price range Sony’s own W995 is a much much better option or you could consider Nokia’s N86 , which would be a close second. Let’s hope the Vivaz Pro fares better even if it does have a downsized camera.