Photo gallery: Sony Ericsson Xperia X10First impressions
Though it's six weeks early, it feels like the 12 days of Christmas to the mobile phonologists here at CNET. First we saw Motorola take the wrapping off its Android baby, the Droid, in the US. Now Sony Ericsson follows suit with a handset that set our hearts aflutter.
Upsides
Though the sleek exterior may suggest otherwise, the Xperia X10 reads like a Hummer on paper — large and powerful. The touchscreen is 4 inches diagonally and features an 854x480-pixel resolution, making it one of the largest and sharpest screens to be released in the near future. Under the hood the X10 packs a 1GHz Snapdragon processor and reportedly has 256MB of RAM, which hopefully is enough guts to run Android plus Sony Ericsson's uniquely designed interface shell.
This shell has two components which Sony Ericsson names Timescape and Mediascape. Timescape is for basic communication and unifies different methods of messaging under a single contact heading, so all of your SMS, email, Twitter and Facebook messages appear when you select the contact from the funky deck-of-cards style menu system. Timescape also pulls tagged images of this contact from a variety of sources.
Mediascape addresses one of Android's shortcomings up until now. Like the iPhone's iPod player, Mediascape unifies all of the media stored on the phone into one central location, with tabs defining music, videos and photos. From the images we've seen so far Mediascape looks to be one of the most attractive multimedia applications available. Add the X10's 8.1-megapixel camera, 3.5mm headphone socket and bundled 8GB microSD card to the mix and you have a very convincing media package.
Downsides
A scan of the X10's specs reveals no gaping holes in what we would expect from a phone of this calibre, but the first thing we plan to test is the phone's battery life. A high resolution 4-inch screen and a processor that is roughly twice as powerful as current generation hardware is bound to tax the X10's 1500mAh battery considerably.
We were also disappointed to read that the X10 will run on Android OS version 1.6, rather than version 2.0 like the Moto Droid. Not only does this mean that the X10 will forgo any performance enhancements in the upgraded firmware, but it also means the X10 will probably ship without Google's new navigation software pre-installed. Hopefully Sony Ericsson has an upgrade solution in mind.
Overall
Watch this space. The Xperia X10 has the potential to be one of next year's hottest mobile phone releases. Timescape and Mediascape bring important features to Android that set it apart from what we see from the competition, but unless the performance is top notch, this handset could end up on the quickly forgotten list. Our fingers are crossed.
The Xperia X10 will be available in Australia in Q1 2010, with pricing to be announced closer to the date. If you want to see more photos of the X10 in action check out the hands-on photo gallery over at CNET UK.
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