Review: Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Android

Overview:

In the lead-up to launching the original Xperia, Sony Ericsson's marketing department went into overdrive, but that was nothing compared to what we've seen ahead of its latest successor: the Xperia X10. It's SE's first foray into the addictive world of Android and looks as stylish as Naomi Campbell. But does the new handset actually live up to all of the hype? Let's find out.

Review:

The Xperia X10 has a minimalistic design, so as not to detract from its number one feature- a gigantic 4 inch screen.

The 480 x 854 screen res with 64K colours makes for a quality display, with blacks noticeably black and other colours coming through vibrantly.

Depending on whether you're indoors or out, the display can be adjusted to account for the light of your surrounds. Imaging further remains visible when in direct sunlight, which is important as we're going into Summer.

Using the screen is a joy, with Apple-esque eerie typing accuracy. The sensitivity of the screen is noticeable, with the phone reacting at lightning fast speeds to a simple brush of your thumb pad.

What is lacking though is multi-touch, which is a shame in such a high-end device. To zoom, you have to make use of the ye olde magnifying glass icons on the screen.

The three buttons below the screen may have slightly confusing symbols, but are for the "menu", "home" and "back". The small LED lights between the buttons add a nice touch to the overall design of the handset.

We've mentioned that this is Sony Ericsson's first attempt at an Android, and while the X10 only comes with version 1.6, you can upgrade to 2.1 for an even better experience.

Sony Ericsson has gone for its Timescape overlay, as an option for the homescreen's display. You can still opt for the basic Android screen, but why would you when you can have this?

Timescape basically lets you keep tabs on all of your windows and apps in the one place. You can see Facebook and Twitter updates, SMS messages and see which song you have open.

The tiles are stacked on top of each other in what Sony Ericsson have for some unknown reason christened "Splines".

To single out a tile from the "spline", you just need to swipe the selected tile left or right. You can even alter your settings to keep tabs on you social networking updates every 15 minutes.

Powered by a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, the X10 is fast once powered up. We found it took awhile to boot, but once it was up and running, the user experience was seamless.

The X10 comes with a decent 1GB of internal memory which can be expanded to 16 GB through a microSD memory card. In the box, you get an 8 GB card, which is enough to store some music and piccies.

While brings us to the camera. The X10 features an 8 megapixel camera complete with LED flash, which has to be manually activated.

The camera comes with smile shot and multiple autofocus to ensure pictures turn out as well as humanly possible each time.

The shots we took came out very clearly, with no blurring to be found. There was also minimal lag time between pressing the photo capture button and the picture actually being taken.

Individual photos can also be tagged Facebook-style, which is handy for storing and searching for them in Mediascape.

Connectivity-wise, the phone supports 3G, GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1.

The battery life on a phone with such a powerful processor was surprisingly not too draining. The X10 comes with a 1500 mAh Li-Poly battery, which lasted two days under moderate usage- calling, texting and checking emails.

We found using the GPS reduced battery life significantly, draining the phone in less than a day.

Overall we had fun playing with this phone and with deals available from £25.00 per month over at MobileShop.com, we think you get a lot of quality features for your money.

We Say:

A screen as large as a TV, a top-end camera and an Android platform makes the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 a truly exciting phone. The picture quality and responsiveness of the screen is fantastic, and the camera is one of the best in the market. Thumbs up SE!