Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10

With a display that giant, the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 never had a hope of being tiny – but it is quite slim and very glossy. We found that it was happy to cuddle away in our pockets without making its presence felt more than with any other sizeable smart phone.

The Xperia X10’s screen doesn’t used AMOLED technology like the HTC Desire, but it is a smidge bigger and offers great brightness and contrast once you juice its brightness up a notch within the Settings menu. Grab a few compatible H.264 videos and you’ll be in portable cinema heaven.

Key features

·         Quad-band GSM and tri-band 3G support

·         10.2 Mbps HSDPA and 2 Mbps HSUPA support

·         4" capacitive touch screen of WVGA (480 x 854 pixel) resolution and scratch-resistant surface

·         16M-color ready (65K effective colors under Android OS v1.6)

·         Android OS v1.6 with complete Sony Ericsson UI customization

·         Timescape and Mediascape UI

·         Excellent social networking integration

·         Excellent build quality

·         Qualcomm QSD8250 Snapdragon 1 GHz CPU, OpenGL ES 2.0 support; 384 MB of RAM

·         8 MP autofocus camera with LED flash, touch focus, image stabilization, geotagging, face and smile detection

·         WVGA (800 x 480 pixels) video recording @ 30fps

·         Wi-Fi and GPS with A-GPS

·         1GB storage, microSD slot, bundled with an 8GB card

·         Accelerometer and proximity sensor

·         Standard 3.5 mm audio jack

·         microUSB port (charging) and stereo Bluetooth v2.1

·         Document viewer

·         Li-Po 1500 mAh (BST-41) battery

·         Great audio quality

Main disadvantages

·         No DivX and XviD video playback

·         No smart dialing

·         Limited storage available to the user on the system partition (you are left with only 512 MB for installing apps)

·         No secondary video-call camera (or videocalling whatsoever)

·         No free GPS navigation solution

·         No Flash support for the web browser

·         No FM radio

·         An extra xenon flash would’ve made the very good camera perfect

·         Feeble loudspeaker

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 is company’s first Android-powered device. But being first is not always a high-quality thing. You have to face some serious early expectations and justify them. That is the best case scenario. But apparently Sony Ericsson hasn’t read that script. Even now, more than a few months after our two X10 previews, there are still some final touches needed.