Veni, Vidi, Vivaz

What fla-vor are you looking for in a cell phone these days? Vanilla just won’t cut it anymore in this fro-yo world with 27 different toppings. Since the world’s gone touchscreen, it’s no surprise that Sony Ericsson has launched a lineup poised to match the competition, tap for tap. They released the Xperia series earlier this year in Singapore, but one other phone on the sidelines there caught our attention: the Vivaz, with its high-definition video capture. You could shoot and publish HD in a matter of seconds (well, minutes) with the Vivaz.

Now comes the Vivaz Pro. More a single-handed phone, the added feature is the QWERTY keypad, a tuck-out tray that gives you an option to tapping on the main screen. The Vivaz Pro seems aimed more at business types (hence “Pro”), until you notice the standby screen upfront: there’s Twitter, just a tap away, plus Facebook and lots of other diversions and distractions for idle hands — YouTube at a touch, Google Maps and WisePilot a few clicks away, plus the Sony Walkman feature with its groovy playlists and easy navigation. It seems this phone may just be as appealing to young hands as it is to BlackBerry toters.

Finding a balance between young and old in a phone is a matter of customizing features, of course. I immediately set to work loading on my personal photos, about 100 MP3s and some videos (including Apocalypse Now Redux and Pulp Fiction for widescreen time-killing). Plenty of free space left. I also had to load on my old phone contacts, which isn’t as intuitive as it might be with other, older phones, but with a little help and phone coaching, it worked fine via Bluetooth synching.

One big plus is that HD video. Shown on a 3.2-inch screen, it may not be IMAX size, but the image quality is superb. Shoot any event in HD, and you’ll never go back to grainy, fuzzy birthday party coverage again. The storage capacity is adequate (about 6 GB for your personal media stuff) and it’s quite easy to drag and drop on either Mac or PC using the supplied USB cable.

Ah, but with so many features, you tend to forget a few main things, like where the buttons are to punch in a number or answer a phone call. No worries; it all comes to you once muscle memory kicks in.

There are a few quibbles. In the interest of saving memory, perhaps, some of my favorite features were dropped from the phone camera, such as BestPic, which, on my old Sony Ericsson W902, allowed me to shoot a series of 12 shots per second and then select the one (or ones) I liked best. This was a very useful feature for capturing mid-air action shots, sport events, or collecting stills to make animated movies on my desktop iMovie. That feature is gone from Vivaz Pro, but there are other compensations: Face Detection (for geotagging) and Smile Detection, Touch Capture, Panorama (yes!) and Image Stabilizer.

Another thing missing is a loudspeaker button for hard-to-catch phone conversations. I miss the option of pumping up the volume with a speakerphone. (There is a speaker mounted on the back with separate volume adjust, but it affects only Walkman playback. Speaking of Walkman, the Vivaz Pro also seems to lack equalizer settings which made the Walkman-specific phone a better-than-expected sound experience.)

While the photo features are ample enough, I kind of miss the jazzed-up slideshow feature on the Sony Ericsson W902: it launched your photo albums with three different musical backgrounds and motifs; this one just pads through the pics. But maybe you get too old for bells and whistles like that at a certain point in life.

Sony Ericsson has also tried to make the 5-megapixel (down from the original Vivaz 8-megapixel) HD camera as one-touch as possible. Two dedicated buttons on the side let you go direct to photo or video, with a zoom button (doubling as a volume key) at the far left. The continuous autofocus is a real plus when shooting video. The 16 million colors offer a very clear, vivid picture.

As mentioned, the QWERTY tray is a plus for those addicted to keyboards. Once you get used to rotating the phone and tapping with two or more fingers again, you may wonder how you managed to double- and triple-click your text messages with one finger all those years.

The Vivaz Pro runs on a version of Symbian, and while it has enviable multitasking ability (this does draw on the battery, though), I noticed a little sluggishness when multitasking, and a little dropped video whenever the auto-orientation kicks in. Plus the touchscreen itself is a bit resistive, not quite as tactile as other models. Flipping through photos works okay, but simply tapping in text messages requires patience and skill. (Again, I reach for the more tactile QWERTY when I get frustrated with having to adjust my finger pressure to the touchscreen. You do miss that satisfying click of keys.) One other neat feature I noticed is this: the phone vibrates a little — just a tiny bit — each time you successfully enter a digit or command. It’s sort of reassuring when you’re texting while driving (bad, bad, bad!), or doing something else completely instead of looking at the screen.

All in all, Vivaz Pro is a nifty alternative to carrying around a Moses-sized tablet in your hands. It’s the kind of phone that might make you reconsider taking along a separate MP3 player and camera wherever you go: the features are strong enough. Plus the rounded “human curvature” shape of recent Sony Ericsson models feels right in the palm, and though the widgets are a little tiny on the screen, they’re accessible. It may not have all 27fro-yo toppings, but really, why eat fro-yo if you’re gonna mix it with Gummi Bears and Oreos all the time anyway? A little selective restraint isn’t so bad once in a while.