Sony Ericsson Vivaz U5i Review

Talk about a phone with middle-child syndrome. While the world waits eagerly for the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 and ponders the intriguing X10 mini, the Vivaz is launched at the same time and is sandwiched somewhere in between. Perhaps its 8-megapixel camera and HD video recording can save it from absolute obscurity?

It feels like aeons since we saw a phone with a unique design profile. The Vivaz walks the line between a familiar square touchscreen and something unique and beautiful. At its top and bottom the Vivaz has rounded corners that fit well in a cupped hand, with a gentle curve lengthwise, which is again designed for ergonomics. Sony Ericsson calls this design "human curvature", and, by all reports, intends to use this design throughout the year in several different handsets.

The Vivaz features a few more external knobs and keys than an iPhone or HTC Desire. Alongside the standby key and volume rocker, you'll also find two dedicated camera keys; one for still photography, the other for video. This is a nice touch, but fairly useless, after all it has never been much of a struggle to launch the camera and then switch to video with any mobile phone previously.

Unfortunately, the user interface design doesn't follow suit with the elegance and simplicity of the phone's exterior. The Vivaz runs on Nokia's Symbian Series 60 platform with a Sony Ericsson skin on top, and this happens to be one of those systems that will have new users curled up with the manual for hours figuring out the best way to use it. The home screen is made up of five active windows which can perform one of only a handful of tasks; display a wallpaper, show a Twitter feed, display a window to your photo gallery, provide customisable shortcuts or display links to your favourite contacts. It's a shame that these windows aren't truly customisable though. Where, for example, is the Facebook option, or why can't we display an active email inbox, or music library? In the end we ditched this theme and opted for a simpler single-screen option which seemed to provide us with more options than with the five screens.

If you've heard anything about the Vivaz, it's probably that it features an 8-megapixel camera with HD video recording (720p); a camera which on paper should replace your compact camera in a heartbeat. After playing around with the camera for a while now we suggest you hang on to that compact camera for now. There really isn't many good things to say about this mobile phone camera and video recorder. A few years ago we might have passed off the poor performance we've experienced as being on par with the average camera phone, but we've seen so many better camera phones recently that the Vivaz won't get off the hook that easily.

Let's first take a look at the HD video recording, and rather than wasting your time trying to explain the experience, we've included a short clip of fast-moving traffic for you to take a look at (make sure you turn the YouTube clip settings up to 720p to get the full effect). While each individual frame looks colourful, you'll notice the jerky movement from frame to frame, probably caused by inadequate processing power within the phone.

Still photography isn't plagued by the same issue, of course, but struggles in different areas altogether. Colour reproduction is inconsistent, and while we've seen some nice shots during our tests, the majority of images taken by this camera end up with strong reds and cold blues and greens. Auto-focus was also a big problem for us, even when we half-pressed the shutter for focus before snapping an image. Wide shots are predictably fine, but shots with subjects at up to a metre or two away struggle to keep the subjects in focus.

Media sharing is one positive, with the Vivaz having a handful of web sharing options pre-installed including integration with Facebook, YouTube and Picassa. If you do manage to take a decent photo or video it is a simple three-step process to get your pics online.

If you're reading beyond the disappointment that is the camera, we can't promise it's going to get much better. Staying in touch with friends, family and colleagues isn't this phone's strongest suit either, thanks to clunky text input and some pretty crumby software for these tasks. Email and SMS messaging is made slightly more difficult by Sony Ericsson's decision to use a resistive touchscreen rather than a capacitive one. This technology is fine for menu navigation, but speedy text input definitely suffers.

Media playback is excellent, as it is on most Sony Ericsson handsets. The software here is similar to the media apps we used to find on the Walkman series phones, it's attractive and very easy to use. You also get an 8GB memory card in the box with the Vivaz, which is a handy quantity of memory, which will be stretched even further if you use the outstanding Media Go software to sync your music. Media Go compresses and optimises media files during syncing, which is great for people with large media libraries at home.

Running on Nokia's Symbian platform bestows the Vivaz with the titles of smartphone, though users of this phone may struggle to see why. Two core features of modern smartphones are excellent small-screen web browsing and app stores, and the Vivaz has neither. If you've used any of Nokia's touchscreens then you'll know how dismal this browser is; it's clunky, slow and hard to use, making it only useful for brief web searches and not for lengthy surfing sessions.

The Symbian Series 60 platform does have hundreds, if not thousands, of apps available to download and install, just don't expect this process to be easy. There is a folder in the main menu titled "Apps" but there is no direct link from the phone to an app store of any sort. Though you can Google search for apps, we suggest using a desktop PC for speed and side-loading the apps after you've downloaded them.

For all of its underwhelming software and its steep learning curve, the Vivaz does deliver pretty decent performance. Scrolling between the five home screen windows is reasonably zippy, and diving down into the menu tree is fine. The Vivaz is capable of multitasking, but don't push it too hard.

The Vivaz does get a big, green tick for battery life. The 3.2-inch touchscreen doesn't draw too much power it seems, and without all the data-intensive apps we tend to see on smartphones, the Vivaz manages two days of battery life at a minimum, though we can imagine many users getting three or four days at a stretch depending on usage patterns.

The Vivaz seems like the perfect phone for those on a budget, but be warned that this particular operating system does come with a number of quirks and a steep learning curve. Lovers of photography be warned as well, we struggled to take great photos and the video quality is well below the expectations created by the HD badge on the back of the phone. The Vivaz can take calls and send messages, and its media player is pretty good too, but those looking for a well-rounded smartphone experience will need to look elsewhere.