Sony Ericsson Vivaz review

Sony Ericsson states that the Vivaz can delivery up to 5 hours 20 minutes of 3G talktime, 2hours 30 minutes video call time and up to 430 hours of standby life.

We reckon that talktime estimation is probably a little optimistic but not way out. After an intensive day of use, including watching and filming HD videos, the Vivaz was about ready to give up the ghost.

But we also managed to get a good two to three days of more casual everyday use out of it before it needed recharging.

Organiser

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz has a whole folder dedicated to organisational apps and functions, but don't look for the calendar here – that has its own menu option.

It's nothing to write home about, but allows you to set reminders and tasks with alerts and deadlines as you'd expect.

In the organiser folder you'll find the clock and alarms function where you can set recurring alarms, like a weekday alarm that doesn't go off at weekends.

There's also a fairly standard note-writing app, calculator, file manager and document readers – although the document readers require licences and therefore payment.

Other handy features to keep you ticking over are the converter app which can tell you plenty about how many kilocalories are in a kilojoule, but only has 'Home' and 'Foreign' options when it comes to currency.

This means you have to set your own rates – we'd have liked this to sync with current conversion rates online, but you can't have everything.

You can, of course, download more apps from the PlayNow store, offering apps from web-publishing through to weather forecasting, although as we said earlier there's not a huge amount of choice there.

Location-based services include Google Maps and GPS positioning. Symbian-based Google Maps is pretty good (although not up to the speed and feature-base of the Android range) and the GPS found us fairly quickly.

Directionally it wasn't too bad either - we navigated between tube stops in the outer reaches of London without getting lost, which is something that still happens far too often due to our rather addled brains.

Media-wise there is an onboard music identification programme called TrackID which works in a similar way to Shazam, as well as a sound recording app for vocal notes-to-self or for recording interviews and so on.

Finally, for the DIY enthusiast, there is an onboard spirit level - good luck getting an accurate reading using either edge of the phone though, there are too many protruding buttons on each.