Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro

It came with other new smartphones in the company's lineup for 2010 including slightly inferior versions of the delayed Xperia X10 in the form of the Mini and QWERTY-sliding Mini Pro running on the same older generation Android 1.6. The Vivaz Pro has nearly all the cutting edge features of the Vivaz Touchscreen except the diminished imaging resolution from 8 to 5 megapixels. Other than that and the new side-sliding QWERTY, the two Vivaz smartphone models are identical.


An HD Vidcam

The earlier Vivaz sports a remarkable 8-megapixel autofocus and touchfocus camera with LED Flash, face and smile detection and geo-tagging. You get all that in the latest Vivaz Pro minus the 8 megapixel resolution which has been reduced to 5 megapixels.

But it retains the high definition 720p video recording at a Blu-ray grade 24 fps made better with continuous autofocus and video light. HD recording is made possible with the capable PowerVR Series 5 SGX engine clocked at 720 MHz. The Symbian S60 5th edition had been tweaked to get this done.

Upscale Features

* It's a dual band 3G/UMTS with HSDPA/HSUPA and a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE on 2G. You get WiFi 802.11b/g with DLNA, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0. There's a built-in A-GPS receiver with Google Maps and the WisePilot navigation system.
* All its HD video captures get displayed in the same 3.2-inch WVGA (360 x 640) near-HD resistive touchscreen with 16 million colors and a scratch resistant surface coat. You get an accelerometer but no proximity sensor. It comes with gesture control with turn-to-mute and alarm snoozing by turning the face down.
* As a media-centric smartphone, there's no video playback support for Xvid and DivX formats. There's the usual stereo FM receiver with RDS, a 3.5mm headphone jack and TV-out (VGA resolution) ports. It has a 1200 mAh Lithium-polymer battery that delivers an outstanding 12.5 hours of talk time a standby time of 18 days.
* The phone memory is a decent 75 MB expandable to 16 GB from its microSD slot. Interestingly, you get an 8 GB microSD card free with the retail kit.

Available Soon

Sony Ericsson plans to have the Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro released in the 2nd quarter of the year. It will be available in two body colors, black and white. No pricing information has been released though we expect than sometime next month at the earliest. We figure with its cutting edge features, this and the earlier Vivaz could be the successor to the venerable Satio in its flagship Symbian portfolio. If so, expect this to come in the same Satio price range at a around ‚¤400 SIM-free.

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