Our Sony Ericsson X10 Review

The latest release from Sony Ericsson, the X10 has been eagerly awaited since its announcement and seems certain not to disappoint.

The first thing to notice, and you can’t really miss it, is the huge 4-inch screen, which takes up almost all of the front of the handset, apart from three small buttons (for home, menu and back) at the bottom.

The X10 uses Google’s Android operating system offers twin home screens, usefully called Timescape and Mediascape. The first is a delightfully intuitive innovation, collecting and displaying recent texts, tweets and emails into an integrated timeline, along which you can search with a swish of your finger. Great in theory, but replying to a tweet, for example, demands that you go back to Twitter’s website, where it should have been possible to make it simpler, for instance just double-clicking the message for an option to reply.

Mediascape is more fun. This is the place where you store all your photos, videos and music, in separate apps, of course. But from here you can see, for example, all the photos on your phone plus those you have uploaded for various profiles and to Picasa or Facebook. Uploading any media to the internet is simple with the Sony Ericsson uploader over Wi-Fi.

One very welcome free gift are the bass reflex speakers which came with the handset, providing great sound quality from the music player.

The camera is a large 8.1 megapixel shooter with gives great results. The LED flash, confusingly, doesn’t come on automatically and it’s a bit of a nuisance to turn it on manually when shooting pictures or video in low light.

This is Sony Ericsson’s first Android phone, and even now the operating system is slightly out of date. However, Sony have promised regular software updates, and there’s no reason to disbelieve them. This means that the many people who sign up for a two-year contract won’t have a handset that dates quickly, but is constantly refreshed. It is great that they company are offering this instead of letting the phone become obsolete within a year, forcing users to buy yet another updated handset. And if you’ve spent around £500 on a phone, you want it to last in terms of both hardware and software.

What We Liked

There are a lot of positive features to recommend the Sony Ericsson X10. For one thing, it comes bursting with 1Gb of onboard memory, upgradeable to a massive 32Gb via memory card, and that’s a huge amount to carry around with you before transferring data to a PC. Battery life was good for a touchscreen, notoriously battery-hungry devices.

What We Disliked

The speed of screen loading was disappointing. Despite its 1Ghz Snapdragon processor, the X10 was a little slow to respond, perhaps because there’s so much graphic action. Not too annoying, but not as fast as some comparable models.

Our Final Verdict

The look and feel of the Sony Ericsson X10 are a pleasure and using it has both pros and cons. But you could say this about any phone, but this one’s good points outweigh the bad by a long way.

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	Sony Ericsson X10
General
Form Factor	Candybar
Dimensions	119 x 63 x 13 (mm)
Talk Time	600 mins
Standby Time	415 hours
Weight	135 g
Quad Band	Yes
Photo and Video
Integrated Camera	Yes
Camera	8.10 megapixels
Camera Flash	Yes
Video Player	Yes
Phone
Polyphonic Ringtones	Yes
Internal Memory	1024 MB
Memory Card Type	MicroSD (max 16GB)
Messaging
Instant Messaging (IM)	Yes
Screen
Colour Screen	Yes
Touch Screen	Yes
Connectivity
3G	Yes
Bluetooth	Yes
Email	Yes
WAP	Yes
Web Browser	Yes
Wi-Fi	Yes
GPS	Yes
Music and Radio
MP3 Player	Yes
MP3 Ringtones	Yes
Additional Content
Downloadable Content	Yes
Downloadable Games	Yes
Downloadable Ringtones	Yes

Sony Ericsson X10 Full Specification

General

Photo and Video

Phone

Messaging

Screen

Connectivity

Music and Radio

Additional Content

Images of the Sony Ericsson X10

Sony Ericsson Xperia X10

Sony Ericsson X10 Xperia Rear