Xperia X10 mini pro

The mini pro’s biggest difference compared with the mini is the addition of a QWERTY keyboard that slides out to the left and its noticeable heft. This is a four-row panel with oft-used punctuation, for example, comma and full stop, in lowercase. The keys may look tiny, but we like the well-spaced out and distinct tactile feedback of the buttons. It’s a pity the spacebar doesn’t click when you press it in the middle. Instead, the nubs beneath are on the two ends of the bar.

The mini pro is also less curvaceous and marginally thicker than the mini due to the physical keyboard. The placement of the ports differs as well. On the mini pro, the 3.5mm audio jack (this has extra contact points even though it can still be used with any third-party earphones) is along the top, with the micro-USB connector on the left edge. The mini has these on the bottom edge of the device.

Xperia X10 mini

The mini has the smallest footprint in the Xperia X10 family, which makes it great to hang around the neck with a lanyard. We like the soft-touch plastic back (available in six colors) which has a pronounced convex design. This gives it a more ergonomic feel in hand. Unlike the mini pro, the screen on the mini doesn’t rotate to landscape mode when we the device is turned sideways (even though we checked the box in the settings) and the default message input method is the onscreen alphanumeric pad. We do like the very quick switching between letters, symbols and numbers on the pad simply by tapping on the right or left of the screen.

The table below shows how few differences the mini pro and mini have.

User Interface

Both the mini pro and mini run Android 1.6 with Sony Ericsson’s custom user interface. The home screen features four customizable quadrants for the Messages, Music, Menu and Contacts apps. There’s space for only one widget per home screen due to the tiny 2.55-inch QVGA display and you navigate the panels by swiping left or right. The display may be small, but the font size is easy on the eyes, so there’s no need to squint to read text on the screen.

The interface was very smooth and snappy, which caught us by surprise since these are prototype units. We suspect that perhaps the smaller and lower-resolution screen minimized the drain on a slower 600MHz processor compared with the Xperia X10. Add animation of applications flying in and out and the four quadrants that rotate into view when you return to the home screen, and our initial experience with the interface went far beyond our expectations.

We also liked the Timescape feature which aggregates all communications in one place. We could view all event alerts, messages, missed calls and browse conversations with a particular person. The Contacts quadrant calls up additional information about someone. From here, the infinite button brings us back to the activity log with him/her. The interface managed to be very holistic and didn’t give the feeling that we were jumping from one app to another, so that’s laudable.

Other Common Features

Both Sony Ericsson models come with a 5-megapixel autofocus camera, Bluetooth stereo, FM radio, Assisted-GPS, microSD expansion card slot, HSPA and Wi-Fi connectivity. The usual suite of Google services including Android Market, Google Maps with Street View, Search widget, etc., are also preinstalled, although the Voice Search option is not available in all markets.

Outlook

The Xperia X10 mini pro and X10 mini are expected in Q2, but based on initial experience, the stability of the software could indicate an earlier commercial rollout. Our initial concerns about the diminutive size of the minis were also allayed after we spent some time with the devices. So we can only hope that Sony Ericsson launches these sooner, rather than later.

[By Damian Koh]

Introduction

With the X10 Sony Ericsson have gone from zero to hundred in a split second. While they may know their way around high-end devices, pulling off an undertaking such as the XPERIA X10 must have been a special challenge. And they have yet to get to the finish.

The thing is that Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 is the first Android smartphone by Sony Ericsson. It’s also a Snapdragon first for the company, and they’ve even come up with a first of its kind proprietary Android UI. Making the X10 a reality seems like a long way full of potential pitfalls for a company that hasn’t still recovered from its financial woes.

But the XPERIA X10 or Rachael, or X3, or whatever it has been called in the long months of development, seems like a device that’s worth all the hard work.

Even more so, X10 will not be a solitary device but more of a high-flying start for a full-blown platform of Android devices with their own distinct interface and user experience. That kinda sounds familiar. A year and a half ago, we were again there listening to Sony Ericsson presenting the XPERIA X1 in much the similar words. Well, let’s hope they’ll have better luck with starting off and developing this new part of their portfolio this time.

Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 at a glance:

• General: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS 900/1900/2100 MHz, HSDPA, HSUPA
• Form factor: Touchscreen bar phone
• Dimensions: 119 x 63 x 13 mm, 135 g
• Display: 4″ 65K-color TFT capacitive touchscreen, 854 x 480 pixels
• Platform: Qualcomm QSD8250 Snapdragon 1 GHz processor
• OS: Android 1.6 (Donut)
• Memory: 1GB storage, 256MB RAM, microSD card slot, 8GB card included in the retail box
• Camera: 8 megapixel auto-focus camera with LED flash and face detection
• Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, standard microUSB port, GPS receiver with A-GPS, 3.5mm audio jack
• Misc: Sony Ericsson custom social networking and media UI, built-in accelerometer

There have been numerous leaks about the XPERIA X10 so chances are you already know most of those specs well enough. As to the few new ones, let us assure you that some of those came as a surprise to us as well.

Take the Android OS version, for instance. Despite all the hopes for getting the latest and greatest of the Android crop, Sony Ericsson are serving a cold meal to all the gadget lovers out there. They refused to comment any further on the matter but perhaps all is not lost. Our best guess is they’ll have some hard time adjusting their proprietary UI for Android 2.0 (Eclair) so they prefer to stick to 1.6 for the time being in an effort to get the XPERIA X10 out in the market as soon as possible.

And the current plans for the X10 availability say Q1 2010. Yup, missing the holiday season and shipping the handset during the tight-pocketed January and February is certainly the last thing they’d like to do, but proper product development obviously demands it.

Speaking of which, the Sony Ericsson X10 units presented at the event were devilishly fast in all Android tasks and applications, but the proprietary UI by Sony Ericsson clearly needed a lot more work.

Design and construction

The XPERIA X10 is anything else but a compact handset – but that’s expected in a device with a 4″ display. Still, due to the curved edges, the phone feels extra thin despite the fact that a girth of 13mm is not ground-breaking (the Toshiba TG01 is 9.9mm).

The XPERIA X10 is also impressively light for its huge screen real estate, so much so that it feels almost plasticy. But don’t let that sound bad, we really liked how the X10 felt and handled.

The XPERIA X10 is the second Android handset sporting a resolution of 854×480 pixels. Believe it or not, that resolution has been a set standard even before the X10 and the Motorola Droid/MILESTONE came to being. It’s even got its own abbreviation FWVGA – short for Full Wide VGA, which simply denotes it’s got pure 16:9 aspect ratio. That FWVGA resolution is actually quite common among widescreen multimedia projectors.

The 8 megapixel camera lens is on the back of the XPERIA X10. There’s also a tiny LED flash here, to keep the lens company. On the top of the device, there is a standard microUSB port, a 3.5mm audio jack and a huge on/off key.

Interestingly, that right there is the only the second Sony Ericsson handset to use a microUSB port (though there should be more to come in 2010). The first one was its XPERIA X2 cousin.

When asked, Sony Ericsson explained they’ve designed, constructed and manufactured the X10 from the ground up all by themselves and they’re not relying on another company such as HTC to do the manufacturing this time.

Obviously using Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 for web browsing will be a real treat. In fact there are a lot of websites that will fit into 848 pixels worth of width without having a side scrollbar. It almost feels as if next year we’ll be seeing mobile phones matching the resolution of your regular netbook, doesn’t it?

Customized Android OS 1.6, but no multi-touch

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 runs on the user-friendly Android 1.6 OS (codenamed Donut). Unfortunately, version 2.0 is still a no-go for the time being and there are no plans for an official upgrade to the latest version.

Another nasty surprise is that the OS won’t be making use of multi-touch gestures such as pinch zooming in the web browser and gallery.

That being said, Sony Ericsson still had some impressive new UI all set on the Android phone and though it still needed a lot of polishing around the edges, it surely showed some nice potential.

Timescape is a user interface (or simply put – an application) that brings all your communications together. It gets activated by pressing the Timescape widget on the homescreen and displays an aggregated view of your SMS, MMS, email, missed calls, Facebook updates and Twitter updates all on one screen. A longer press on a tile lets you preview its content.

You can easily filter the displayed stuff by event types or by contacts (strangely called Infinite view).

Quite similarly called, Mediascape gathers all your media together. Music photos and video each have a dedicated homescreen divided in two parts – local and online.

Camera

A clever automatic face recognition system has been integrated in the images department as well, recognizing up to five faces in any image. Once you name each of those faces, it goes ahead and recognizes all its appearances in your phone gallery. What’s even more, tapping on the face on any of those photos afterwards, allows you to call or text that person.

Sony Ericsson are also promising that the 8 megapixel camera on the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 will have all the features you would expect from a Cyber-shot cameraphone including, but not limited to, Face and smile detection and Touch focus.

The photos certainly look great for a pre-production unit. The amount of resolved detail is pretty satisfying, although not as impressive as it was on the Sony Ericsson Aino. We are pretty pleased with color saturation as well.

The noise levels are pretty decent with chroma (colored) noise almost nowhere to be seen on these shots.

The first three shots were probably taken with a different metering mode enabled as the handset tried to retain as much detail as possible, resulting in a flat and unrealistic image. While it will give you more headroom in post-processing we are pretty certain that most of the users would prefer the punchier output, witnessed in the last couple of shots.

When it comes to the video, it is recorded in WVGA 800 x 480 pixel resolution at almost 30 fps (about 28fps to be exact).

Final words

Well, it’s been nice to check out what Sony Ericsson have been up to lately. From what we see they certainly have been hard at work in the upper segment of their portfolio and we really like to think that they’ve been equaly hard laboring in the midrange behind closed doors. Anyways, the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 might as well be their magnum opus after a long period of setbacks and we really hope it will get them back on track. We quite enjoyed what we saw and we’re looking forward to seeing some more once the X10 gets a more polished custom UI and more balanced performance. Hopefully, it should be out on the market some time in February.

[GSM Arena]