Sony Ericsson has gone through quite a few smartphone operating systems in the past few years. Now they're on Android, a hot and exciting new smartphone OS, and that's a good thing. Like most Sony Ericsson smartphones, this is a high end piece of hardware with a capacious 4" capacitive touch screen, 1GHz Snapdragon CPU and an 8.1 megapixel camera.
The Windows Mobile 6.x platform is on its way out as Microsoft readies for the release of Windows Phone 7 at the end of 2010, so Sony Ericsson is now trying their hand at Android. Android is a hot, fresh platform and Sony Ericsson chose well this time. The folks at SE know how to make uber-sexy high end hardware and the X10 fits into this category.
Specs at a Glance
The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10a (the “a” stands for Americas and indicates that it has US compatible 3G bands and is meant for sale in the Americas) is an Android 1.6 (donut) smartphone. It has a 4” capacitive touch screen with 854 x 480 resolution, an on-screen keyboard and an accelerometer. It has WiFi, Bluetooth and a GPS that works with Google Maps. The phone has a gig of internal storage with approximately 425 megs free for your use and a microSD card slot (an 8 gig card is included). The processor is Qualcomm’s 1GHz Snapdragon—one of the fastest mobile CPUs available as of this writing. It’s boatloads faster than the old 528MHz Qualcomm CPU used in many Android phones like the Hero and MyTouch 3G. It’s the same CPU used in the Nexus One and HTC HD2. Sony Ericsson is known for their great camera phones and the X10 has an 8.1 megapixel camera with autofocus and an LED flash. Sony Ericsson includes software customizations that are pleasant and non-intrusive.
The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, Nexus One, HTC HD2 and the iPhone 3GS.
A walk Around the Phone
This is a large but not ungainly phone. Quite the opposite, it’s one of the most attractive Android handsets we’ve laid eyes on. That said, it's a plastic phone and doesn't feel quite as high end and rugged as the Nexus One. It’s available in black and white and we have the black model for review. The front face is dominated by the large 4” touch screen, with three chromed mechanical buttons below. These buttons are more like bars so they don’t add to the phone’s height. They’re easy to use and have good tactile feel. They handle the standard Android menu, home and back functions (the usual fourth Android search button is MIA).
Side controls are simple: volume buttons and a dedicated camera key on the right side. The 3.5mm stereo jack, micro USB port (under a rubber door) and power button are up top. The phone’s plastic back has an attractive matte finish and it curves at the sides to feel great in the hand. It’s a yank-off style back and there’s a small groove at the bottom where you’ll start pulling it off. The microSD card slot is under the battery door and unfortunately you must remove the battery to access the card.
The 4” capacitive display is very bright (once you disable the very conservative auto-brightness feature) and sharp. This is one of the largest displays on the phone market: lovely. We miss the multi-touch support and will have to wait for OS 2.1 to get it. No fault of the screen itself, the unlock screen makes us want to shriek. You must do a long arcing diagonal sweep from the bottom to the upper right section of the display (Pythagoras tells us they couldn’t have found a longer path). That’s way too long a motion and you have to do it quickly (but not too quickly) or it will bounce back. Argh! Sony Ericsson’s custom on-screen keyboard makes us want to throw the phone out the window. I have used, with few complaints, many Android phones’ on-screen keyboards and never had problems. With the SE keyboard the best we got was 50% accuracy in both landscape and portrait modes—yeegads. Switching to the standard Android keyboard helps (press and hold on the 123 button to select a different keyboard) but I still found the Nexus One and others easier to use. That’s strange since the larger the screen, the easier typing should be.
Video Review
Here's our video review of the Xperia X10. We show the hardware in detail and take a look at Sony Ericsson software such as Timescape and Mediascape as well as built-in Google applications. It's a great way to see Sony Ericsson's Android customizations in action.
Software
The Xperia X10a runs Android OS 1.6 which is starting to look a little old since the Motorola Droid (Milestone overseas) shipped with 2.0 and has just gotten a 2.1 upgrade and the Google Nexus One runs 2.1. Not that Sony Ericsson is the only manufacturer that’s guilty of shipping 1.6 or even 1.5 recently: the Motorola Cliq XT, Motorola Backflip, Acer Liquid and a variety of Samsung phones all shipped with older OS versions too. Generally, if the manufacturer heavily customizes Android, it takes time to rework those customizations to work with the new OS, hence you don’t always get the latest OS. Though Sony Ericsson’s customizations are subtle, there are plenty of them, so we’re a bit understanding. However, Sony Ericsson tells us that the Xperia X10 won’t get an OS upgrade to 2.1 until Q4 2010. Yikes! That’s a small eternity and by then 2.1 will likely seem a bit old as Google releases new OS versions this year.
So what are Sony Ericsson’s customizations? The most salient are Mediascape and Timescape, both of which we like. Timescape is a timeline of activities: Facebook updates, Twitter feeds, MySpace status updates, messages, call log, photos you’ve taken and music you’ve played. It uses a flappable deck of cards metaphor and is easy to use and fun. If you don’t want or need certain items, you can remove them from Timescape. You can use it as your home screen or stick with the standard Android desktop and access it via shortcuts at the bottom of the home screen. The same goes for Mediascape; it’s available as an icon at the bottom too. Even if you go with the default Android desktop, you’ll get a Timescape widget that shows the latest item. If you tap on it you’re taken to the Timescape screen and you can flip through the cards. If you don’t like the widget, you can remove it from the desktop just as you would any Android widget. Watch our video review to see Timescape in action.
Mediascape is a multimedia application that looks clean and is intuitive. It provides access to photos, videos and music. The music player has online access to PlayNow and the photo viewer has access to Facebook and Picasa. Since the standard Android 1.6 multimedia players are weak, we welcome Sony Ericsson’s Mediascape.
The web browser is the standard Android webkit browser. There’s no Flash support and there’s no pinch zooming because that feature was added in Android 2.1 unless a manufacturer wanted to write their own driver (as did HTC for the Hero and other Android phones). Likewise there’s no voice input for Google search in 1.6, but Sony Ericsson did manage to get the newer version of Google Maps on the phone so you can get spoken navigation.
Other software includes Sony Ericsson Sync (it claims to sync your PIM data to SE servers) and Moxier, an excellent MS Exchange client. Wisepilot was included with our unit and it’s a GPS, mapping and navigation application. The application is tailored for use in Europe; for distance and speeds are metric only, and only Scandinavian countries are available for business searches. But the app can download maps and POIs for US locations when using the “near me” search option and directions are clear and logical as long as you can think in meters.
Phone and Reception
The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10a is a quad band GSM unlocked world phone that will work on AT&T and T-Mobile in the US. You’ll only get 3G HSDPA on AT&T though since it has 3G on AT&T’s 850/1900MHz bands. The phone automatically configured itself with the correct data settings when we inserted our AT&T SIM card and we were then able to use all data services. Reception on 3G was average among AT&T phones. It has better reception than the iPhone 3GS: using the same SIM at the same location the Xperia had a -95db signal vs. the iPhone’s -101db.
Voice quality is loud and clear, and the Xperia behaved well as a phone. Data speeds were likewise very good. Here in the Dallas area we have AT&T HSDPA 7.2Mbps service and the Speedtest.net app reported an average of 3,000kbps for download speed and 700kbps for uploads. The Xperia actually did better on the Speedtest.net application than did my iPhone 3GS using the same SIM at the same test location (the iPhone 3GS averages 2,500kbps down and 280 up).
Camera
It’s hard to argue with a Sony Ericsson 8.1 megapixel camera phone. As you’d expect, it takes lovely photos and it has options for single autofocus, multi autofocus, macro, face detection and infinity focus modes. You can select from a variety of scene modes such as portrait, night, beach and snow, sports, party and document and you can tweak the exposure. The camera has scene recognition, smile detection and touch capture options, and that’s it for photo settings.
The video camera can shoot at VGA, wide VGA, YouTube optimized, QVGA and MMS resolutions. That’s pretty much it for video settings. VGA video averages 25fps and as we’ve noted in prior comparisons, the Sony Ericsson does well against most phones except Nokia Nseries phones for video quality.
Battery Life
What happens when you combine an extremely fast CPU, large display and 3G wireless? The battery says “ouch”. The 1500 mAh
Conclusion
The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10a is undeniably a hot phone. It’s great looking, well made and the specs are positively top notch. The camera handily beats the Nexus One’s as does the speaker volume and quality. Our review unit had stronger cell reception than the Nexus One. But the Nexus One has its strong points too and these include a newer OS and built-in Google apps and faster performance. While the Xperia is fast, nothing beats the Nexus One. That said, our unit doesn’t have final firmware and it is running customizations on top of the OS that can slightly degrade performance.
We like Timescape and Mediascape, and just in case you don’t, you don’t have to use them. There’s nothing like flexibility. We also appreciate the inclusion of Moxier since Android 1.6 lacks Exchange syncing. Google Maps has navigation and Wisepilot is there if you want to try something different. We sorely miss multi-touch support; HTC’s Android phones and the Nexus One have forever spoiled us and it’s not pleasant to go back to using on screen zoom buttons and single-touch keyboard input. Speaking of keyboards, the Sony Ericsson software keyboard isn’t pleasant, but you can switch to the standard Android keyboard that isn’t tops but it works.
The hardware is excellent, from the large capacitive display to the Snapdragon CPU to the 8.1 megapixel camera. It’s not likely to be obsolete in a few months. It’s hard for us to assign a final star rating without knowing the price, so our rating is provisional as we assume the phone will sell for $600 to $650. If the actual price varies significantly from this, we’ll adjust our star rating.
Pro: Top notch hardware and good looking too. Excellent 4” capacitive touch screen, top-of-the-line 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, great camera, enjoyable software customizations. Solid reception and fast data speeds on AT&T’s 3G network. Very good audio quality for multimedia and capable video playback.
0 comments:
Post a Comment