With a very compact design,the Sony Ericsson Vivaz looks quite good and refreshingly different than a lot many phones today. The phone is fully focused on the 3.2-inch resistive touchscreen with the very sleek menu,call connect and disconnect buttons below it. The two sides have an interesting blue colour that provide a very different look to the phone. On the left side there is the micro USB slot and the 3.5 mm jack. The other side has the volume/zoom rocker,the video and camera buttons. At the top is the lock and power button and the bottom has the stylus attached with the string. It is slightly arched at the back and it has the 8.1MP camera in the middle with the LED flash right next to it. In terms of user interface,the Vivaz is a winner with its very fluid and quick response time inspite of the resistive touchscreen. The menu buttons are well defined and do not confuse while navigating. The homepage has five tabs. The favourites tab,Twitter,wallpapers,gallery and shortcuts page which has eight shortcuts and is quite customisable. Other than this,the homepage has the dialer,multimedia,messages and the location finder via GPS options. The menu screen is pretty neat with all the necessary programs in place. It has the music player,Internet,applications,camera,messaging,call logs,media,location,contacts,calendar,organiser and settings buttons. The applications hold a bunch of interesting things like the TrackID,Download chat options etc. For connectivity,the Vivaz boasts all the jing-bang with 3G,GPS,Wi-Fi,Bluetooth,among others. But in terms of call quality,the phone is quite a letdown. Though the sound quality is decent while one is stationary,but it becomes quite difficult to hear the other person with even a small amount of disturbance. The camera that is the focal aspect in the device with its 8 MP sensors. Both camera and the video recorder have different buttons for operations and have an LED flash light for support. The LED also acts as a supporting light while taking videos. The camera clicks good enough pictures and has features like video calling,touch focus,geo-tagging,face and smile detection,just like a compact digital camera and the video camera records videos at 720 p (high definition). However,though,the Vivaz offers a video calling,the funniest part is that there is no secondary camera,so in case one is to be available on the video,will not be able to see the other person. So,we can safely say that Vivaz could have been a lot better with a secondary camera as well. Some other points of slight disappointment are the sound quality and the battery life (with the 1200 mAh battery),which are both below power. The loudspeaker in the Vivaz gives a very low output and the battery does not stay for long and gets exhausted within a day. However,to sum it up,the Vivaz is a good device and has all the features that one wants in their smartphone. The style,looks and performance all rolled in one. The other phone we feel,that comes close to the Vivaz,is the Samsung Omnia II,with its 3.7-inch AMOLED resistive touchscreen,Windows 6.1 Professional OS,a more powerful 800 mAh CPU and a dual LED flash,but has a 5 MP camera. © CyberMedia www.LD2.in Mail:talkLD@cybermedia.co.in
