Sony has come up recently with its latest offerings. It is the U5i or else you can also call it the Sony Ericsson Vivaz. A new smartphone with a completely new look. The design is all-new with a trendy curved black.

The back of the Vivaz is moon silver color, artistically combined with inlaid blue sides. It is said that this combination gives the phone a look of style and elegance. The phone has a 3.2-inch wide screen and just below it are three keys, the call key, the menu and the end call keys.

Vivaz supports 3G, but there is no secondary camera on it. Seems little poor concept of 3G technology. At the back side it has 8.1-megapixel camera, which is really of good quality to get high resolution snapshots. Moreover, the camera has auto focus and LED flash.

The sides, which is catchy blue color, houses 3.5 mm jack on the left and a power-cum-data port on the foot. On the left side there is a tiny speaker giving a wonderful sound quality. The volume rocker is on the right blue side apart from two keys to support video recording and still camera. This side also houses two light indicators to show new message, missed call or incoming call.

8.1-Megapixel Camera

The superior quality camera on the back curve side of Sony Ericsson Vivaz supports high performance video recording. It captures 720p@24 frames per second. The internal memory of the phone is not much i.e. only 74 MB, but the external memory supports up to 32 GB through microSD card. The microSD card comes along with the sales pack.

The still camera of the phone comes with optional scene settings such as the likeportrait, the twilight, landscape, sports, documents, beach and snow settings. More to this, it has smile detection feature too.

The touch capture and panorama features of the Vivaz are also excellent. After the first click of the images, the other two consecutive are clicked by its own. The resolution of the pictures can be set up to 3264×2448 pixels. Though the flash is almost same like other phones, but the camera really takes great pictures.

Vivaz is capable of recording movies in 720p format at 24 fps in 16:9 aspect ratio. The output quality of the video is outstanding and it comes with few resolution settings like VGA, QVGA and picture message. Yes, the photos and videos can also be geo-tagged.

Apps, apps and many apps on Vivaz

The Vivaz is full of apps. It comes with 5 good looking screen panels with icons at the top such as Twitter, media wallpaper browser, fixed media wallpaper, shortcuts. Apps such as Facebook, instant message, SMS preview, WorldMate and Conversation Message and Gtalk are pre-loaded in the phone. It also comes with trackID, media server, Roadsync, Phone Search, Google apps and Quick Office.

The Google Maps app is also loaded in the device and it is on the basis of location, which can help the user in locating different positions and calculating his or her trip distance. One can also find out directions of the destination with the help of this app.

Well, though there are too many apps in the phone but it is not properly organised. The radio, instead of coming under the media folder, it shows in the apps folder. Same with the Google app, Phone Search and Roadsync. These are under organiser folder in the phone. Whatever it is, but these errors does not effect in the running of the handset.

The inside processor of Vivaz

The phone runs on Symbian Series 60, which is the fifth edition of operating system. It is powered by 720MHz PowerVR SGX graphics processor. About the connectivity, it offers GPRS and EDGE of Class 10 having HSUPA support. Sony Ericsson Vivaz supports Wi-Fi 802.11b/g with DLNA for the wireless home network connectivity. It has Bluetooth v2.1 with A2DP capability also. Well, the wireless connectivity of the phone is really excellent and it works too smoothly.

Miscellaneous

For handling enhanced functionality documents the phone has Quick Office and Adobe Reader features. The speakers of Vivaz are too good and the battery backup is just excellent. It serves a power of two and a half days with a single charge and over half an hour of video recording. The full charge gives a talktime of two full hours along with browsing the Internet over Wi-Fi.

Price Tag of Vivaz

Now the phone is tagged at Rs 24,000. In the similar type, Nokia N97 costs Rs 23,000 and LG BL40 comes in Rs 25,000.