/>Sony Ericsson Vivaz
The bi-yearly phone plan update had arrived, and I stood for the fairly difficult choice of a new mobile phone.
It was a hard choice this year. My last phone was windows mobile, and I kind of enjoyed it. I liked the versatility of the platform, and the small form factor of the smartphone. It had a severe drawback however, in the battery life. I could barely get through a day on one charge, with light usage. Also, the limited size of the main memory meant I could only run a few extra applications. It had 4 gigabytes of extra space, but the phone was not able to use that effectively.
At the time of choosing I was very interested in getting a Windows Phone 7 device. But when they started releasing information about the phones, they turned out to be unimaginative slabs. Adjusting my view to the Android devices, I quickly discovered that particular area suffered from the same design deficiencies.
Being quite disappointed, I stalled my choice a few weeks, until Joost recommended a Sony Vivaz. It wasn't a very good phone, but at least it had nice looking HD video capability! It was also the only phone that looked a bit different and was small enough for my liking.
After the customary month of angry phone calls to the Vodafone "service"-desk, I finally took delivery of my new phone, sent it back, and got one that didn't crash a week later.
Since I've enjoyed it very much. It's one of few smart phones that is able to hold a battery charge for a week. It's also very fussy about making internet connections, which I like. The images are pretty good, and I'm even able to make out vague shapes in the videos.
The downside of the phone is that it's a Symbian device. In a world that's moving to Android that kind of sucks. Especially since Sony announced they won't be releasing updates for Symbian anymore, and no one makes applications for the platform; all developers switched to iOS or Android.
It's a nice phone, but it's an end-of-cycle product. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Either get an Android device, or a low end phone and a proper camera.