Mobile Computing News

Photo: Sony Ericsson

Sony has introduced a new phone into their range – the Xperia X10. It has a smart, sleek and rather original design, but what’s pretty impressive is the big 4-inch LED screen. The full colour touch screen displays all the important widgets like Timescape which gives you automatic updates of Facebook, My Space and Twitter sites, and a quick scroll up menu. The Xperia X10 has 3G connectivity and uploads to websites quickly, and the change from vertical to horizontal is done very smoothly with no delays.

What’s it got?

The Xperia X10 uses a 1GHz Snapdragon core processor, making it a powerful and effective phone. The logs are kept on a system called ‘Spline’ which allows you to scroll up and down to check messages, social networking updates and phone calls. The Spline may be quite slow when loading all the items, but speeds up once the process gets going. The Sony Ericsson X10 runs on Android version 1.6, not the highest, but seeing that Google keeps on installing new versions, it’s difficult to keep up. The mobile phone is compact and a bit bulky at 13 mm thick, but is still light enough to carry around.

Photo: Sony Ericsson

The new Sony Ericsson mobile phone has fully integrated sites like YouTube, Google Maps and Gmail. The X10 has an 8.1 mega pixel camera, giving it the highest res count among all Android phones. The camera has loads of customisable options like white balance control, smile detection, autofocus modes, multiple metering and more. The only photo feature it struggles with is macro capturing, and can only shoot images up to 4 inches away. The Xperia X10 has excellent sound quality, especially while on a phone call, almost no distracting noise can be heard, and sound is very clear and precise. The speakerphone also works well, and is ideal for conference calls.

Encountering a few problems

The X10 has great quality for both video and audio displays, but may be a bit slow once all your applications and websites have been calibrated onto the phone. The keypad has a few problems and freezes then starts again which is rather bizarre, but on the bright side the keypad can be changed because of the Android technology. There is no .com button which may throw some people off, and the X10 goes retro with zoom buttons in place of the now popular pinch to zoom feature.

Already released

With a powerful processor, cool widgets and designs, the X10 has potential, but it seems that Sony Ericsson just tried to do too much in one phone, and that makes it slow. The camera is a huge bonus, and photo enthusiasts will enjoy the options and clear picture of a regular point-and- shoot camera. The audio application is also really cool and displays all the album art you could wish for. Sony has tried and tried again with their X1 and X2 Android phones and hasn’t yet succeeded. But the Xperia X10 has been improved and comes close to a great phone; it just needs a few changes here and there. The Sony Ericsson X10 was released in March 2010 and costs £500.