T-Mobile Vivacity Review

Feature set summary for T-Mobile Vivacity review

A desktop net surfing experience from the full HTML browser, plus the five-megapixel snapper offers good results in daylight. Images can be copied, shared and rotated.

Style and handling summary for T-Mobile Vivacity review

The T-Mobile Vivacity, which apes an iPhone 4, looks good but has a rather odd feel

Battery power summary for T-Mobile Vivacity review

Watch out for the juice-draining GPS, 3G and Wi-Fi – you should get 240 minutes of talktime and 200 hours on standby.

Performance summary for T-Mobile Vivacity review

Nice snapper and browser, but the virtual keyboard is sluggish, which makes it hard to input long messages

User friendliness summary for T-Mobile Vivacity review

The operating system, Android Gingerbread, is easy to use and offers plenty of facilities, especially for a £100 handset. It’s easy to get your social network and email accounts set up, and T-Mobile’s My Account app is a useful addition.

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Well, they say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery – in which case Apple should be feeling rather smug. T-Mobile has come up with the Vivacity – an Android handset that seems remarkably like an iPhone 4. Mind you, as it only costs £99 on prepay, there’s a pretty big clue that it’s not really going to be in the same league…

A good imitation

A first look might have you fooled though – it has the square, flat body and a trim of silver around the shiny black front. It’s a bit fatter and the camera’s five-megapixel lens sticks out a little on the reverse. Beneath that chassis sits an 800MHz chip and 512 MB of RAM. However, pick up the Vivacity and you’ll be in no doubt that this is no Apple flagship phone – it’s really light, and while its 3.4inch display proves responsive, it is rather sluggish.

Mind you, that’s hardly surprising – it’s a quarter of the price of an iPhone 4. Even so,if you’re willing to splash out another 30 quid, you could pick up the Huawei Vision, which has a 1Ghz chip and a 3.7inch screen. On the plus side though, the T-Mobile Vivacity does have a decent, high-clarity 267ppi WVGA screen.

Sweet treat

At the heart of the Vivacity is Android 2.3 Gingerbread, a pretty recent version of the operating system, and a decent one at this kind of price. There are plenty of features to enjoy – web, email and social networking is really simple to set up. All your contacts from the likes of Facebook, email and Twitter can be synched and Microsoft Exchange and Google calendars loaded into the Calendar app – T-Mobile has preloaded Twitter and Facebook apps, and all mail apps let you reply/reply all, forward, flag and save drafts.

If you’re familiar with Android, you’ll recognise the five screens on offer, which can all be customised with your choice of widgets (including news, weather and clocks) and shortcut icons. Plus a useful notifications bar can be dragged form the top of the display to show all your new alerts and events.

It’s a shame though, that even though the Vivacity features a capacitive screen, it’s rather sluggish. This is especially noticeable when using the onscreen keyboard – it’s frustrating when you’re trying to type a long message.

Slow starter

It’s a pity, because you’re getting such a good Gmail experience compared with some of the more powerful, pricier phones on the market, but you’re let down by the slow keyboard. The lag is not so noticeable when surfing the net – your swipes and light touches seem to work really well. The Vivacity has the Dolphin browser on board, which does a great job – offering multiple window support, pinch to zoom and the option to load full versions of sites. There is copy and paste but implementing it can be a tad tricky.

Orange tends to fill its phones up with a lot of bloatware, but T-Mobile has resisted the temptation. There are just two preloaded apps – Top Apps and My Account, which helps you keep tabs on how much you’re spending on your mobile account. Of course, access to the Android Market means you have half a million or so apps to choose from.

Snap happy

Where corners haven’t been cut is with the snapper – which offers good results in daylight. A front-facing VGA lens is also onboard for self-portraits and video calls – images were somewhat faded, but it’s still a nice inclusion at this price point. There is a video recording option on both lenses, but we found the films rather noisy and they had a slow frame rate.

Our conclusion

The T-Mobile Vivacity’s main rivals are the Orange San Francisco II and the Huawei Vision. The Vivacity wins hands-down on the design front (even if it is a clone), and the snapper and browser are fabulous for this kind of price. However, the sluggish touchscreen could prove too aggravating from some. Even though this handset costs just under 100 quid, you can still get more for your money elsewhere.

By Simon Thomas on 02nd December, 2011

Tags: T-Mobile Vivacity, T-Mobile, Huawei