Sony Ericsson may have faltered in recent years, but their first Android smartphone, the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, is a serious effort worth looking into. Armed with top-flight hardware, excellent UI and generous feature set, it’s certainly a solid offering.
Physically, it’s quite big. While it can cram into your jeans pocket, to call it uncomfortable will be an understatement. The overall look is great, punctuated by sturdy construction and a good feel in hand (thanks, according to Sony, to the curved face design). Because of the size, it fits in a huge display – a whopping 4-inch touchscreen with 854×480 resolution. Images look gorgeous and the touch interface is very responsive, easily making it one of the best touchscreens we’ve used among the Android set.
As a phone, call quality is decent. It’s far from being the best, but everything sounds clear on both ends. At higher volumes, though, you can find a noticeable distortion. The speakerphone performed similarly, with plenty of loudness to go. Battery life is rated at 8 hours and we’ve been able to take it for almost two days of moderate use without fully draining yet.
Armed with a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, the X10 runs very fast. Apps opened quickly and navigation is smooth. It supports both 3G and WiFi so expect fast browsing. Do note that the phone uses a proprietary UI called UXP, which is the main reason why it’s still running Android 1.6. The main draw is a Motoblur-like application called Timescape, which would have been great, but, for some reason, tends to miss updates every now and then. Whether it’s an issue with spotty connection or a bug isn’t clear to us.
It comes with all of Android’s vaunted strengths, including messaging, Google integration and all that jazz. Outlook support isn’t built in, but is easy enough with the bundled Moxier app. Sony Ericsson threw in an excellent onscreen QWERTY keyboard for emails, but made it inaccessible for SMS, which just sucks. There are a number of useful preinstalled apps too, such as the OfficeSuite file manager and Wisepilot.
Like many of their higher-end devices, the company equipped the X10 with a high-res optics module. The 8.1 megapixel camera takes good photos, although it’s still not as great as the best we’ve seen from the Cybershot line. We love the music and video player (Mediascape), which is truly a notch above the media experience from other Android phones. The interface is attractive and it offers a slew of add-on features.
Overall, we love the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10. While sticking with Android 1.6 is a bit of a disappointment, the positive UI experience and additional integrated features (i.e. Timescape, Mediascape) somewhat makes up for it. Expensive, though, at around $700 or higher unlocked.
