The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 – Redefining Android the Sony Ericsson Way

As the first Android snapdragon smartphone with flagship features at their best, the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 is taking shape to be the most ambitious project for the struggling mobile phone maker.  Missing the holiday shopping rush, Sony could be in for an uphill marketing challenge on the X10 when it releases the smartphone this January – a most inauspicious month when people pay off their credit cards and generally shut out any more spending after splurging during the holidays.

Advantages at a glance

This is a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE on 2Gnetworks a tri band UMTS on 3G with high speed data connectivity HSDPA/HSUPA for blazingly fast internet surfing speeds.  Other data connectivity options include WiFi 802.11 B/G for wireless hotspot surfing and Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR for fast wireless synching and data transfers between your handset and your PC.

You get the usual GPS, USB 2.0, microSD expansion up to 32GB and 3.5mm headphone jack.  But the stand-out features are the following:

You have a 1GHz Qualcomm QSD8250 Snapdragon processor behind a multi-tasking Android 1.6 Donut modified with a User Interface Sony calls the UX, short for User eXperience which used to be known as Rachel. Its imaging features pushes the limits of camera phones with an 8.1 megapixel autofocus camera with photo-video light, DVD-quality WVGA video recording at 30fps, image stabilization, face and smile detection and geo-tagging from its GPS receiver. Its WVGA 4” capacitive touchscreen at 16:9 aspect ratio raises movie watching experience on the road to its highest satisfaction level on a mobile gadget. It comes with the usual accelerometer for auto-rate viewing orientation

Some Caveats

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 as revealed in its prototype hands-on exploring reveal some issues precisely from its strong points.  While its 1Ghz Snapdragon processor virtually promises the moon for Android fans, the X10 may have battery issues that result from the Snapdragon’s power hungry processing speeds.

It looks like Acer’s underclocking the similarly featured Liquid A1 was a wise move to squeeze out 5 hours of talk time from a 1350mAh lithium-ion battery.  We hope the 1500 mAh battery on the slightly larger X10 will deliver about the same lifespan even without underclocking.

The responsiveness of the Rachel/UX user interface was lagging on the prototype and Sony’s tinkering to enrich the Android OS over the last months may have a lot to do with it.  We can’t understand this as it flies in the face of the powerful Snapdragon CPU.

Despite the enrichment, you still won’t get 16 million colors on the otherwise gorgeous 4” display.  It doesn’t even have an FM radio.  But this could have been remedied had Sony ported the Rachel UI on the more powerful and capable Android 2.0 Éclair.  And then there’s the bank-breaking tag price on the handset when you pre-order from some online marketers.  At a hefty?610, you may be tempted to look elsewhere.  But if Sony can fix its issues, we are confident many Android and non-Android fans will find the X10 difficult to resist.

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