The recently concluded 2010 Mobile World Congress showcased some really fascinating and promising smartphones that should be appearing this year starting March. Sony Ericsson revealed a new lineup that includes a sister phone to its Vivaz touchscreen smartphone announced before the congress – the Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro.
With a "pro" appended to the name, the new Vivaz sports a sliding full-QWERTY keyboard that with the same touchscreen functionality should appeal to the more serious corporate types for its excellent messaging while getting the same entertainment features Sony Ericsson is known for.
The QWERTY slider half increases the Vivaz Pro dimensions and weight at109 x 52 x 15 mm weighing 117g against the slimmer Vivaz at 107 x 51.7 x 12.5 mmat a mere 97g.
Symbian at its Best
You get a dual band 3G/UMTS with HSDPA/HSUPA for high speed internet surfing and a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE on 2G. Data connectivity is served with WiFi 802.11b/g with DLNA, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0.
Like the Satio and the Vivaz, the Pro uses the PowerVR Series 5 SGX graphics engine clocked at 720 MHz. It runs the latest Symbian S60 5th edition OS that got further tweaking from Sony Ericsson programmers to provide its own superior Symbian flavour user interface.
Its imaging feature goes down in resolution from the 8 megapixels in the Vivaz to just 5 megapixels in the Pro, but the camera still gets the same features like LED Flash, autofocus and touchfocus, face and smile detection and geo-tagging. What stands out is its high definition 720p video recording that gets video light and continuous autofocus support
Its images and HD video captures get displayed in brilliant 3.2-inch WVGA (360 x 640) near-HD resistive touchscreen with 16 million colors and protected with an anti-scratch surface coat. There's a gravity accelerometer but no proximity sensor. It supports gesture control with turn-to-mute and alarm snoozing by turning the face down.
It has a built-in A-GPS receiver with Google Maps and the WisePilot voiced turn-by-turn guidance for its navigation system.
Positioned as a media-centric smartphone, the Vivaz and its Vivaz Pro sister do excellent job except that it has no video playback support for Xvid and DivX formats, though a 3rd party playback app can neatly solve that. You get the same a stereo FM receiver with RDS, a 3.5mm headphone jack, wireless A2DP listening and TV-out (VGA resolution) ports.
A 1200 mAh Lithium-polymer battery used in the Vivaz powers the Pro to deliver an outstanding 12.5 hours of talk time and standby time of 18 days.
The phone memory is just 75 MB but you get 16 GB memory expandability from its microSD slot. Its retail package includes an 8 GB microSD card.
The Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro is positioned as a social networking smartphone so you get SNS apps for Twitter and Facebook, including YouTube and Picasa integration for media file sharing online. There's Quick Office and PDF document viewer, WebKit web xHTML and WAP browser with Flash video support and the messaging apps for IM and push email client support. You also get PlayNow access for downloading apps, games and music.