Of the world's largest phone manufacturers, perhaps none has taken a more twisted road to smartphone ubiquity than Sony Ericsson. It began its journey back in the pre-joint venture Ericsson days by throwing its weight behind Symbian, a smartphone platform that would ultimately become the world's most popular -- but it made a fatal error in supporting the doomed UIQ flavor that never saw even a fraction of the support its S60 cousin did. UIQ's untimely (but predicted) collapse last year left the company nearly rudderless and ill-equipped to deal with competitors like Nokia, HTC, and Apple, all of whom had long since embraced other platforms -- all with fighting chances of market dominance.
Left without a platform to champion, Sony Ericsson would ultimately continue supporting Symbian through its involvement with the Symbian Foundation and phones like the Satio and Vivaz... and it would ramp up support for Windows Mobile with the Xperia X1 and X2... and it would bring Android into the fold with the X10, all within a few months of each other.
All told, Sony Ericsson enters 2010 actively supporting three unrelated smartphone platforms, and comments by CEO Bert Norberg at MWC in February lead us to believe that they'd be happy to take on a fourth (or more) if the opportunity presented itself. It's an odd strategy to be sure, particularly for a company that's struggling mightily and shrinking its workforce more than any other top-five manufacturer. How it intends to effectively compete on three different fronts without spreading itself hopelessly thin, well... that remains a huge question mark.
That said, the Xperia X10 is perhaps the most promising of Sony Ericsson's confusing crop of modern smartphones, combining attractive hardware with killer specs, Android, and an intriguing custom skin. Does it hold its own against modern competitors like HTC's Nexus One and Desire? And more importantly, can it keep Sony Ericsson from going over the brink? Read on to find out.
Left without a platform to champion, Sony Ericsson would ultimately continue supporting Symbian through its involvement with the Symbian Foundation and phones like the Satio and Vivaz... and it would ramp up support for Windows Mobile with the Xperia X1 and X2... and it would bring Android into the fold with the X10, all within a few months of each other.
All told, Sony Ericsson enters 2010 actively supporting three unrelated smartphone platforms, and comments by CEO Bert Norberg at MWC in February lead us to believe that they'd be happy to take on a fourth (or more) if the opportunity presented itself. It's an odd strategy to be sure, particularly for a company that's struggling mightily and shrinking its workforce more than any other top-five manufacturer. How it intends to effectively compete on three different fronts without spreading itself hopelessly thin, well... that remains a huge question mark.
That said, the Xperia X10 is perhaps the most promising of Sony Ericsson's confusing crop of modern smartphones, combining attractive hardware with killer specs, Android, and an intriguing custom skin. Does it hold its own against modern competitors like HTC's Nexus One and Desire? And more importantly, can it keep Sony Ericsson from going over the brink? Read on to find out.
Software
The X10 isn't just an Android phone -- it's also the first to introduce Sony Ericsson's rather comprehensive Android skin, a package we'd first heard of in the middle of last year under the codename "Rachael." Unfortunately, it's taken the company so long to get Rachael good enough to launch that we're now two releases of the Android core beyond where the X10 stands; this phone comes with 1.6 out of the box, while devices like the Nexus One, Droid / Milestone, and Legend are putting along on 2.1, and we've no doubt that the next big version is just around the corner. Sony Ericsson has wisely committed to updating the phone on an ongoing basis, but it speaks to the same problem with which HTC and Motorola are already well-acquainted: when Google's iterating on its mobile platform at this breakneck pace, it's virtually impossible for the heavily-customized skins like Blur and Sense to keep pace.
That said, Android 1.6 (née Donut) is still a perfectly serviceable version of the platform, and Sony Ericsson has injected a few key modifications that make some of the benefits of 2.0 / 2.1 moot. The meat of these tweaks revolves around two applications, Timescape and Mediascape. Timescape starts by going down the same social aggregation path that Motorola has with Happenings and HTC with Friend Stream -- basically, a chronological timeline of your friends' status updates across Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace -- but keeps going by offering other timelines for other services within the phone (photos, SMS and MMS messages, emails, and so on). These timelines are presented in ultra-trippy 3D stacks that Sony Ericsson has coined "Splines," and once status updates have been properly loaded into memory, these so-called Splines perform pretty well -- they're slick and smooth as you flick them up and down with your finger. There's some pretty nasty initial jerkiness, though, if you haven't viewed Timescape in a while.
Speaking of jerkiness, the X10 suffers from the same issue that plagues the Nexus One: despite the blazingly fast 1GHz Snapdragon core that's aboard, portions of the interface feel barely quicker than a lowly 528MHz MSM7201A. Since we've seen similar issues on the Nexus One, we can't really chalk up the problems to Sony Ericsson's customizations, so we're not sure how or where to place the blame -- it's just inconsistent, even without having loaded any third-party apps. Things that seem like they'd be extraordinarily processor intensive (scrolling through a Timescape Spline, for instance) can be super fast, while a drop dead simple operation like opening a pop-up menu can momentarily bring the phone to a halt. We don't get it, but we're hoping it's something Google and Sony Ericsson can tighten up over time through software updates.
Specifications
Camera
8.1 megapixel camera
Up to 16x digital zoom
Auto focus
Intelligent face recognition features
Geo tagging
Image and video stabilizer
Photo and video light
Send to web (photo and video upload)
Smile detection
Touch focus
Video recording
Recent shot tray
Music
Album art
Bluetooth™ stereo (A2DP)
Media player
Music tones (MP3/AAC)
PlayNow™
TrackID™
Web
Bookmarks
Google™ search (from standby)
Web feeds
WebKit web browser
Communication
Sony Ericsson Timescape™
Speakerphone
Vibrating alert
Messaging
Conversations
Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync®
Picture messaging (MMS)
Predictive text input
Text messaging (SMS)
Design
Auto rotate
Gesture control
Picture wallpaper
Touchscreen
Entertainment
3D games
Media browser
Infinite button
Video streaming
Video viewing
YouTube™
Organiser
Alarm clock
Calculator
Calendar
Flight mode
Infinite button
Office suite
Phone book with dialer
World clock
Location-based services
A-GPS
Google Maps™
Wisepilot™ turn-by-turn navigation* (free trial version)
*The service may not be available in every market. For more information, go to www.sonyericsson.wisepilot.com
Connectivity
3.5 mm audio jack
Bluetooth™ technology
Micro USB connector
Synchronisation
USB support
Wi-Fi™
Preloaded applications
Sony Ericsson Timescape™
Sony Ericsson Mediascape
Sony Ericsson Home with clock widget
Sony Ericsson Sync
Android Market™ Client
Gmail™
Google Calendar™
Google Maps™ with Street View
Google Media Uploader
Google phone-top search
Google search widget
Google Talk™
Google Voice Search™
Network Location Provider
Set-up Wizard
YouTube™
Screen
65,536 colour TFT touchscreen
4.0 inches
480 x 854 pixels (WVGA)
Scratch-resistant
Accessories In-Box
XPERIA™ X10
Battery
Stereo portable handsfree
8 GB microSD™ card
Micro USB cable for charging, synchronisation and file transfer
User documentation
Miscellaneous
Size: 119 x 63 x 13 mm
Weight: 135 grams
Phone memory: 1 GB internal storage
Memory card support: Up to 32 GB additional storage via microSD™
Memory card included: 8 GB
Operating system: Google™ Android Donut, version 2.1
Processor: 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon™ QSD8250
Battery: 1500mAh
Audio & Video
Audio Codec: AAC+ ; Advanced Audio Coding ; Adaptive MultiRate – Narrow Band ; Adaptive MultiRate – Wide Band ; DLS (ringtones) ; General MIDI (ringtones) ; MPEG-1 layer 3\r\nMPEG-2 layer 3,\r\nMPEG-2.5 layer 3 ; SP-MIDI (ringtones) ; Wave format PCM ; Windows Media Audio 8 ; Windows Media Audio 9 ; enhanced AAC+ ; iMelody (ringtones) ; Windows Media Audio 10
Audio Codec Encoding: Adaptive MultiRate – Narrow Band – Encoding ; Advanced Audio Coding – Low Complexity profile Local + streaming: up to: 128 kbps @ 48 kHz
Audio Mime Type: audio/3gpp ; audio/amr-wb ; audio/midi ; audio/mid Receiving only ; audio/mp3 ; audio/mpeg3 Receiving only ; audio/mpeg Receiving only ; audio/mpg3 Receiving only ; audio/mpg Receiving only ; audio/x-mp3 Receiving only ; audio/x-mpeg Receiving only ; audio/x-mpg Receiving only ; audio/mp4 ; audio/mp4a-latm Receiving only ; audio/rawhz ; audio/rhz ; AMR audio/amr ; AMR audio/x-amr Receiving only ; audio/vnd.rn-realaudio ; audio/x-pn-realaudio Receiving only ; audio/sp-midi Receiving only ; audio/wav ; audio/x-wav Receiving only ; audio/wma ; audio/mobile-xmf ; audio/x-midi Receiving only ; audio/iMelody Receiving only ; audio/x-iMelody Receiving only ; audio/x-m4a ; text/x-iMelody
Video Codec: H.263 Profile 0 level 10 ; H.263 Profile 0 level 45 ; H.263 Profile 3 level 10 ; H.263 Profile 3 level 45 ; H.264 Level 1 ; H.264 Level 1b ; MPEG-4 Level 0 Part 2 Visual Simple profile ; MPEG-4 Level 0b Part 2 Visual Simple profile ; MPEG-4 Level 1 Part 2 Visual Simple profile ; MPEG-4 Level 2 Part 2 Visual Simple profile ; MPEG-4 Level 3 Part 2 Visual Simple profile ; Windows Media Video 9 Local + streaming: QCIF@15 fps 128 kbit/s
Video Codec Encoding: H.263 Profile 0 level 10 Encoding ; MPEG-4 Level 0 Level 0b Level 1 Level 2 Level 3 Visual Simple profile
Video Mime Type: 3GPP video/3gpp ; MP4 video/mp4 ; MP4 video/mp4v-se Receiving only ; MP4 video/mpeg4 Receiving only ; Real8 Video video/vnd.rnrealvideo ; Real8 Video video/x-pn-realvideo Receiving only ; SDP application/sdp ; Windows Media video/wmv
Availability and versions
Networks
UMTS HSPA 900/1700/2100
GSM GPRS/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900
UMTS HSPA 800/1900/2100
GSM GPRS/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900
Available in selected markets in Q1 2010
Colour
Sensuous Black
Luster White
Optional
Hi-Fi Wireless Headset with FM Radio MW600
Car Charger AN300
Screen Protector ET902
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