Sony Xperia X10 Review

I just returned back to Australia after 6 months abroad and unfortunately my old HTC TyTn II was stolen while I travelled so I was waiting to I came back here to buy a new phone. Lucky for me I found out that my phone provider 3 would offer me a free phone on no contract for being a loyal customer over the years by accumulating credits towards a new phone upgrade.

I really had little time to research but the Xperia was a familiar name and it looked to have great features, especially the 8.1 mega pixel camera with LED flash. It also felt and looked sleek while the large 4 inch touch screen would be a nice thing. It had a good sound system being a Sony and I had heard of Android but really to be honest had no idea what it was all about, only that it was some new phone platform that offered open development. Of course I was also attracted by the GPS features that looked advanced from the brochure and the 16 gig memory card access.

Unfortunately my network would not offer great broadband access out of Sydney so that caused a few problems considering this device really relies on the Internet even to use a diary in the calender. I found out though that have Google Maps on your Smartphone is a nice feature with real time GPS tracking.

It was a very nice bonus to find out it had video recording, actually it is of quite a high quality and I have already uploaded several clips to YouTube. It’s also exciting to hear that the next Android upgrade will include HD video recording features at 1280 x 720 pixels and the screen will now have 16 millions colors. More on this upcoming firmware upgrade can be found here.

Using the camera is all good but I really have not got used to the shutter button, it just seems too flat although my plastic phone cover is probably not helping. I also purchased some screen covers which is something I would recommend to do right away. You will find that you can buy them for half price for what you would normally pay at Paddy’s Market in Sydney if you live there.

The camera does have a led light which is great but it’s a little tricky to have to go to Advanced settings each time to turn it on/off. The image stabilization feature is good to have as is the quick settings to choose the image type, i.e Landscape, Portrait, Night Portrait and even Document. All in all the camera feature means I now won’t have to buy a point + shoot camera or carry my DSLR out each time I want to take some basic photos.

I have found the security drawing features on this device to be quite confusing. First, there is the default requirement of you needing to slide your finger from one side to the other. This can be annoying as it will activate while I’m using the phone and have not done anything for a short time. The other one is where I activated the “Finger Pattern” recently but now I don’t want to use it I can’t seem to work out how to turn it off. I went into settings but it won’t let me turn this feature off.

I have downloaded a number of games for the Xperia X10 but nothing has really been outstanding but it doesn’t mean there is none that are, I just have yet to find them.

The Xperia X10 has a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor which puts the Apple iPhone to shame, a large internal memory of 1 GB and this can be cranked up to 16 GB by inserting the microSD memory card. My phone came with an 8 gig card which should be sufficient anyway.

The phone has Wi-Fi plus an HTML browser. It will soon have HTML5 browser support with the next firmware.

Let’s take a look at the specs:

Key features

• Quad-band GSM and tri-band 3G support
• 7.2 Mbps HSDPA and 2 Mbps HSUPA support
• 4 inch touch screen (800 x 480 pixels) with scratch-resistant surface
• 16M-colors soon (currently just 65K)
• Android OS with complete Sony Ericsson UI customization
• Timescape and Mediascape UI
• Very good social networking integration
• Top quality build
• Qualcomm QSD8250 Snapdragon 1 GHz CPU, OpenGL ES 2.0 support; 384 MB of RAM
• 8.1megapixel camera with auto focus 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 video calling whatsoever
• No Flash support for the web browser
• No FM radio
• Lousy loudspeaker

I guess these disadvantages are not too bad. You can download an Android FM radio app, Flash should be supported in the future, the speaker could be hooked up to a better one but the lack of front camera for Video calling is something you will have to get used to as I can’t see a way around that one.

Three have a good offers for this phone and you can find out more on the specs they offer here