The Sony Ericsson Vivaz is a small and reasonably-priced phone with a terrific feature set, including most notably a full Web browser, an 8.1-megapixel camera, and HD video recording. But the Vivaz's balky, confusing, and often downright bizarre interface makes it a royal pain to use. As a result, I can't recommend it to anyone.
I'm not usually a hater. I like a wide range of devices—from the Symbian-powered, non-touchscreen Nokia E72 ($349, ) to the touchscreen Motorola Droid X ($199.99-569.99, ) and the hybrid BlackBerry Torch ($199.99-499.99, ). But all those gadgets have one thing in common: an interface that's at least somewhat adapted to their input method. Not the Vivaz, which combines a cheap, balky touchscreen, tiny interface elements, and itty-bitty ugly text to repel users.
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Sony Ericsson Vivaz (AT&T) : Angle
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Physical Features and Phone Performance
The Vivaz is a small, light (4.2" x 2" x .5" HWD, 3.42 oz) candybar-style phone with a black front and blue or pink back. The plastic feels cheap and greasy to the touch. The 8.1-megapixel camera lens is on the back.
Specifications
Service Provider
AT&T
Operating System
Symbian OS
Screen Size
3.2 inches
Screen Details
640-by-360, 16m-color TFT LCD resistive touch screen
Camera
Yes
Network
GSM, UMTS
Bands
850, 900, 1800, 1900, 2100
High-Speed Data
GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA
Processor Speed
720 MHz
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The 2.8-inch screen is high resolution, but low quality. Even at 360 by 640 pixels, text and interface elements are often so tiny as to be nearly unusable. Colors seem pale, and the whole thing washes out in sunlight.
The Vivaz is an HSPA 3.6 phone that works on AT&T's and foreign 2G and 3G networks; it also features 802.11b/g Wi-Fi. The Vivaz gets mediocre reception, and it over-reports its signal strength. I had trouble connecting a call at one point while it displayed two bars. The earpiece and speakerphone are both clear, but not all that loud. Transmissions through the mic sound clear, but harsh and trebly, and plenty of background noise comes through. Battery life was decent for a 3G phone at 5 hours, 5 minutes of talk time.
The Vivaz comes with Vlingo's powerful voice command software, but you can't activate or even use it with a Bluetooth headset, and it's buried three levels deep in menus. By the time you find the voice command option, you might as well have typed the command.
Software and Interface
When I shook the box the Vivaz came in, a stylus on a little string fell out. That's a bad sign. If your phone needs a stylus to do anything other than write Chinese characters and make beautiful drawings, chances are your interface is totally broken.
As it turns out, the Vivaz has the worst interface I've encountered in years. You have to do everything on the touch screen, but the small, high-res screen shrinks many interface elements down to untouchably tiny size. Combined with the balky resistive screen, that results in a lot of inaccurate, frustrated grunting and stabbing.
The best example of this UI horror are the two on-screen keyboards. In portrait mode, the keys are insanely tiny. They make Palm Pre keys look like dinner plates. Turning the phone on its side, you get a landscape-mode keyboard that takes up the whole screen, so you don't see any of the context of what you're typing. The keyboard has no auto-correct, and it takes several presses to register many keys.
The horror doesn't stop there. Buttons don't do the expected; panels are pointless; programs crash. The phone's custom home screen consists primarily of a big animation of waves rather than useful widgets or data. You can easily jump over to a built-in Twitter app, which crashed several times during my testing.
The built-in Opera browser renders pages beautifully, but, once again, using it is a chore. Many pages default to showing text so tiny it's impossible to click on links. There is no pinch-zooming, and tap-zooming works unreliably. In the gallery app, swiping to the side didn't advance by one photo. It advanced by five or six, making it difficult to find an individual photo.
Apps and the Vivaz
The Vivaz's GPS works with free, built-in Google Maps, though once again text displayed was tiny, and I had to jab the Options button six times to pull up a menu. The assisted GPS locked in quickly, claiming I was a half-mile from my actual location.
The Vivaz is actually a Symbian Series 60 smartphone, but that won't matter much. The Vivaz's spec sheet shows a 720 Mhz processor, which should run apps well—if you can find them. AT&T's app store, which is a poorly-designed WAP page, only has a few apps. The adventurous can go out and try to find apps from GetJar.com and other third-party stores, but Symbian fans would be far better served by a higher-quality device like Nokia's N97 Mini ($449, ) and E72.
The built-in e-mail program supposedly handles POP and IMAP accounts, though it had trouble with my Google Apps account, and the phone comes with RoadSync to sync with Exchange. Typing e-mail on this device is so difficult, however, that it really doesn't matter whether the software works or not. The phone also comes with AIM, MSN and Yahoo!-compatible IM programs. Again, you won't want to type anything into these, either.
Multimedia
The Vivaz is a capable multimedia phone hobbled by annoying usability quirks. Take music, for instance. The phone has a 3.5-mm headphone jack, works with Stereo Bluetooth, and syncs with either Windows Media Player or Sony Ericsson's own Media Go software on the PC. So far, so good. The device only has 19 MB (!) of free memory, but it comes with a 2 GB MicroSD card, and my 16 GB SanDisk card worked fine.
The music player has one really annoying, unheralded problem: every time you add new songs, you have to hit an unlabeled "manual update" button on the phone, like you would on a Windows Mobile device from 2003. The phone also had problems identifying and filing podcasts I downloaded with Media Go.
Video on the Vivaz follows a similar storyline. The Vivaz plays WMV and MP4 videos in up to VGA resolution smoothly, and Media Go will reformat nearly any video playable on your PC into something that looks great on the phone's tiny, sharp screen. That screen is tiny, though. The Vivaz comes with YouTube and MobiTV streaming video apps which promise much. But MobiTV, especially, was sluggish and suffered from untouchably small interface elements.
The 8.1-megapixel camera gets absolutely terrific resolution (for a phone camera) in good light, with very little noise and good macro focus. Low-light shots, on the other hand, have the usual cameraphone blur problems caused by too-low shutter speeds. The phone records videos in 720p (1280x720) HD, but my test videos both had a strange skip in them a few seconds in. After that they were smooth, but a bit washed-out.
An Unfortunate Distinction
The Sony Ericsson Vivaz stands out in only one way: it has the worst user interface I have ever seen on a smartphone. The balky resistive touchscreen makes things worse, but I've seen good phones (from Samsung) with resistive touchscreens. The Vivaz' OS simply isn't designed to work well with fingers.
I wish I could recommend the Sony Ericsson Vivaz, because $79.99 (after rebate) for an 8.1-megapixel, 3G cameraphone with a full web browser and HD video recording sounds like a pretty great deal. But I can't. This may be the most infuriating, unusable phone in America. Avoid it.
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) running iOS 4.
)—though the good stuff was yet to come.