Global-Soft.Net

Sony Ericsson may be financially limping at the moment but that has not derailed its claim to having some of the best mobile phones in the market.  With the Satio firmly up in the totem pole and the upcoming Android Xperia X10, it is starting the year with its first set of product announcements that include a Symbian S60 5th edition smartphone – the Sony Ericsson Vivaz.

Running on the same PowerVR Series 5 (SGX) graphics engine used by Satio but clocked at 720 MHz instead of 600 MHz, the new handset offers the one feature the Satio doesn’t have – a high definition 720p video recording.  Admittedly, HD playback suffers a bit without DivX and Xvid video format support, though that can be addressed with a 3rd party app installation.

Feature Richness with Some Left Out

The Vivaz is a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE on 2G and a dual band UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA on 3G.  Hotspot surfing is supported with a WiFi 802.11b/g with DLNA and you get the usual local data connectivity options Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0.  There’s A-GPS with Google Maps and the WisePilot navigation systems that allows SatNav features like voiced turn-by-turn direction.
Its expansive wide aspect 3.2-inch resistive touchscreen supports 640 x 360 resolution and 16 million colors.  There’s an accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate viewing.  Unfortunately it has no proximity sensors so its touchscreen sensitivity remains active even when held against the ears in a call.  But its data input facility for virtual on screen alphanumeric and QWERTY keys is very responsive even without a stylus – something we don’t expect from a resistive touchscreen.
Its most remarkable feature is its 8 megapixel autofocus and touch-focus camera with LED flash and video light.  It has face and smile detection and geo-tagging from its A-GPS receiver – enough to put the Vivaz at the top of camera smartphones.  But it gets better with a full 720p video recording at Blu-Ray quality 24 fps frame rates.  This makes it a direct rival to the Samsung Omnia HD with the same HD recording capability and Symbian OS.
Multimedia takes of from Sony’s Walkman heritage with playback features that support the popular image, video and audio file formats except DivX and Xvid.  It has the usual stereo FM receiver with RDS, a 3.5mm headphone jack and TV-out (VGA resolution) ports.
Its 1200 mAh Lithium-polymer battery when fully charged deliver one of the longest talk times in its class at a remarkable 13 hours and a standby time of 18 days.
Software-wise, the Vivaz has the usual Java apps social networking like Facebook and Twitter as well as media sharing sites like YouTube and Picasa.  There’s a PDF and MS office document viewer, handwriting recognition, Push email and a WAP 2.0 NetFront web browser

Availability

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz is slated to hit the markets anytime within the 2nd quarter.  It will be available in four special body colors – silver moon, cosmic black, Venus ruby and galaxy blue.  No pricing information is yet available but we expect its SIM-free price to hover a bit below that of the Satio range which is now in the ₤400 price point.