The Vivaz Pro has some lovely features, including an HD video camera, a QWERTY keyboard and a pretty quick processor too. But the Symbian operating system holds it back and takes out the fun – the intuitive enjoyment you should get from your phone.

Style and handling on the Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro

The Vivaz Pro is just 15mm thick with a rounded shape that feels good in the hand. Like its predecessor, the Vivaz HD, the Pro is a media phone, with a high-spec camera and video. The five-megapixel lens is smaller than the Vivaz HD’s eight megapixels, but there is the addition of a four-line slide-out QWERTY keyboard. On the right-hand side of the handset are dedicated camera and video buttons, and there are also the twin benefits of a 3.5mm audio port and a miniUSB charger port – a welcome departure from the proprietary Sony Ericsson charger port.

The 3.2-inch resistive touch-screen needs hard treatment to operate, but the slide-out keyboard means you’re not reliant on on-screen typing, so it’s less of an issue than is was on the Vivaz HD.

The aged Symbian OS has been overlaid by Sony Ericsson’s own user interface, but it still feels creaky. The five home screens are basically oversized shortcuts to applications such as the browser or gallery, and the Adobe Flash application turned out just to be a Flash-animated background that changes orientation when you turn the phone around. But you can link the screens to your favourite contacts and web links, and re-order the position of the programs in the All Programs menu.

Lock the handset, and a rather ugly black box appears that links to the dialler, messages, gallery and search function.

Camera on the Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro

The Pro’s five-megapixel camera gets better results than many other phones with similar specs, with almost instantaneous shutter speed and just one second to wait between taking your next picture. The shutter button is close to the keyboard, which made the whole experience feel unsteady and sometimes led to unintentional typing.

Daylight shots are so clear as to be on a par with the Vivaz HD’s eight-megapixel camera, although pictures taken in low light come out slightly faded and fuzzy. Bright light led to overexposure, but shots taken in the shade were sharp and clean.

The video camera shoots video at a high-definition 720 frames per second, and offers ‘continuous focus’, which means you can pan the camera around and it will automatically refocus as necessary. Playback is smooth, and a TV-out port means you can watch your footage on the big screen. We also like the front-facing camera for making video calls.

You can share your photos using email or text, or upload them directly to Facebook, Twitter or Blogger. The Facebook application itself is well implemented, and preloaded apps for YouTube, WorldMate travel organiser and NeoReader, the handy barcode scanning app. These make up for Symbian’s lack of a central apps downloads portal.

Internet and email on the Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro

Go online and you will automatically be taken to mobile-optimised websites. It can handle non-optimised sites but with no autofit function, you are left having to drag the page around to be able to read it all. Pages load quickly – even non-optimised sites are up in less than 10 seconds thanks to HSDPA and Wi-Fi connectivity – and pictures and graphics look clear, although the text is a little ragged at the edges. There’s no cut and paste function, sadly, but you can view multiple pages in a carousel, and subscribe to RSS feeds from the browser.

Email is pretty basic. There is no push notification and the lack of HTML support means you won’t be able to view in-message graphics. You have to refresh your inbox manually, and new messages come up as simple white text on a black background.

We added our Gmail account and found that we didn’t get our mails displayed as conversations as we do on the desktop and many other handsets, although we did get access to custom folders.

The slide-out QWERTY keyboard is great, with matte keys that are well spaced out and take little pressure to operate. There are shift keys for capitalising and an alt key for numbers and common symbols. It’s nice to see a dedicated question mark key but contracted words aren’t automatically given an apostrophe and you don’t get your ‘I’s automatically capitalised either. Copy and paste works as it does on a PC: just press the shift key and a direction key to select text. You can hold down a finger and drag too, but this takes some practice.

The verdict on the Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro

The Pro’s QWERTY keyboard makes this phone far easier going than the Vivaz HD, and the high-definition video is another good addition. The camera is lower spec but still produces decent results. Email is mediocre at best. The Pro is basically a feature phone with internet features – good enough in itself but unlikely to cut it against similarly priced smartphones.