Another High End Smartphone – The Sony Ericsson Vivaz

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Another High End Smartphone – The Sony Ericsson Vivaz

Once in a while a truly wonderful mobile phone comes along that it can’t help but jolt the market starting to grow tired of so-so gadgets and wanabees.  The first ever official product announcement from the struggling Japanese mobile phone maverick Sony Ericsson promises to be one.

If its initial pictures and tech specs are to be believed, the new Sony Ericsson Vivaz, formerly known as the Kurara prior to being launched, has everything to bring back the glory days of the once mighty Sony Ericsson name.

First the stand-out features

The Vivaz does not have the Satio’s unchallenged position as the top camera phone to beat with its 12 megapixel camera, but only an 8-megapixel snapper.  With autofocus and touchfocus, face and smile detection, LED flash and geo-tagging, this is often enough to qualify a mobile phone as among the top notch camera phone.

But the Vivaz goes further.  It has a 720p high definition video recording at a Blu-Ray quality 24 fps frame that the Satio can only approximate at a mere VGA resolution at 30 fps.  Other comparisons are tempting especially with the Samsung i890 Omnia HD which is also a Symbian phone with 720p video recording which makes the two direct bitter rivals to the top.

Display HD in all its glory requires a large capable screen.  In the Vivaz, you get a 3.2-inch wide-VGA touchscreen display with 16 million colors typical of Symbian smartphones.  It’s nearly as large as the 3.5 inch display on the Satio and also enjoys a gravity accelerometer for auto-rotate viewing with the handset tilt.

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.

The Vivaz is powered by 720 MHz PowerVR SGX graphics processor found on the Satio which has a lower 600 MHz clock speed.  This would account for the CPU-intensive 720p HF video processing that the Satio doesn’t have.

Outstanding Features

The Vivaz is a 3G phone on a dual band UMTS with HSDPA at 10.2 Mbps and HSUPA at 2 Mbps data connectivity. It is also a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE on 2G.  There’s WiFi 802.11b/g with DLNA for hotspot surfing as well as Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0 for local data synching.

There’s A- GPS with Google Maps and WisePilot navigation system that allows a voiced turn-by-turn road direction like any GPS SatNav gadgets.  It has the usual stereo FM receiver, 3.5mm headphone jack and TV-out (VGA resolution) ports.

Its 1200 mAh Lithium-polymer batter provides one of the longest talk times in its class at a remarkable 13 hours and a standby time of 18 days.  Software-wise, the Sony Ericsson Vivaz has the usual Java-based apps for social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter as well as media sharing like YouTube and Picasa.  It also has PDF and MS office document viewer, Push email and a WAP 2.0 NetFront web browser.

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