The Sony Ericsson Vivaz – A Vidcam With A Phone

admin    Twitter Apps     Ericsson, Phone, Sony, Vidcam, Vivaz

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz – A Vidcam With A Phone

For sure, there are not that many handsets in the market that can claim exquisite looks.  It’s a freshly unique standout in form just at first glance, avoiding the drab black slab of most other wide touchscreen handsets out there.  Looking deeper, it gets compellingly better.

Forget about its Symbian S60 5th edition OS and just think about it as a great camera and HD videocam with phone functions.  This is the Sony Ericsson Vivaz, codenamed Kurara during its heyday in the online rumor mill and the very first product to be announced by the leading Japanese mobile phone maker for 2010.

Expected to be released within the first quarter of the year, the new Symbian smartphone just might take the markets if its Android Xperia X10 gets delayed any further.  And if Sony has taken care not to worsen its reliability image over past handsets, it looks like a sure winner.

It’s an HD Vidcam

Let’s start from its remarkable imaging features.  It has an 8-megapixel autofocus and touchfocus camera with LED Flash, face and smile detection as well as geo-tagging from its built-in GPS receiver.  This would have been enough to put it up there among the finest camera phones.  But it also takes 720p high definition video recording at a movie-grade 24 fps frame rate and made better with continuous autofocus and video light.

Not bad when you consider that Blu Ray discs are also encoded at 24 fps.  HD recording would not be possible without a capable processor and the Vivaz has it with a PowerVR processor clocked at 720 MHz, an SGX graphics accelerator and sufficient RAM at 75 MB which must be fast enough.

Top Notch Features

To show off its HD video capture, there’s an average-sized but near-HD 3.2-inch semi-wide VGA (360 x 640) resistive touchscreen with the usual 16 million colors courtesy of the Symbian OS support.  There’s the usual gravity accelerometer for auto-rotate but sadly lacks a proximity sensor to disable the touchscreen sensitivity in a call. After that, all the other features are just your typical high end smartphone set.

This is why we said the Vivaz is really a camera with a phone function, though by no means are the phone features a second thought.  On the contrary they are as superb as its vidcam function.

On the hardware front, this is your basic 3G smartphone on the dual band UMTS (900/2100) with the usual HSSPA at 10.2 Mbps and HSUPA at 2 MBPS for high speed data connectivity.  Of course, it’s also your quad band GSM (850/900/1800/1900) with GPRS/EDGE on 2.5G data connectivity.

There’s WiFi 802.11b/g with DLNA, Bluetooth 2.1 and microUSB 2.0 for wireless and wired data synching, respectively. You get GPS and stereo FM receivers, 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 that allow integration with social networking sites like Facebook and twitters as well as media sharing sites like YouTube and Picasa.  It also has PDF and MS office document viewer, Push email, WAP 2.0 NetFront web browser and the WisePilot navigation system and Google Maps supporting its GPS and A-GPS function.

If you enjoyed this article please consider sharing it!