Mid-end flagship?
During time of desperation Sony Ericsson went to the build a phone with the latest, fastest, biggest hardware available at its time and the result is Xperia X10. 8 months is a long time in the phone industry, but this phone still hold its ground against recent flagship models from competitors. However, a powerful hardware is only a battle half won...
Physical design
The maiden time you hold the phone in your hands, you will be surprised that it feels light even after housing such a huge screen. Personally prefer gadgets with sharp designs, but they are generally uncomfortable to use. However, X10 brilliantly hide the sexy ergonomic curves behind the sharp frontal design. This result in a device a joy to hold even after extended usage while looking good at the same time.
Glossy plastic is used for the front, while the side is chromed plastic that will may wear off.The back of the phone is made of soft matte plastic for comfortable grip. Caution is required as its 8 megapixel camera is not well protected. Although the phone feels light and comfortably, full plastic construction makes it feel cheap for a flagship phone nowadays.
The massive 4" display takes up the bulk of the frontal estate,requiring regularly cleaning since it is a fingerprint magnet. The screen is scratchproof, but Sony Ericsson thoughtfully applied a screen protector for you. It is so well placed you may not even notice its existence and applied another screen protector. I really hate capacitive keys and X10 offers physical keys. The 3 chromed plastic keys below the screen is situated far enough not to mispress the touch screen when accessing them. However the tactile feedback of the keys feel flimsy and the chrome paint will wear off easily.
3 more keys is situated at the right side of the phone for volume rocker and camera. The side keys feel more solid than the frontal keys and have a gentle contour to easily identify them without looking obstructive. The top house the 3.5" audio output ,a large lock/power key and the USB port. The lock key position result in mispress when using the phone in landscape mode but works great in portrait mode.
The USB port is the achilles heels in X10 design. Instead of employing a slider cover to protect the usb port,it features a flimsy flap instead. To connect the usb port results in the flap being turned to uncomfortable angles. A quick search in the web can find numerous cases of broken flap in less than a month, with no hope of replacement flap manufactured by sony.
Hardware
X10 features a 1ghz snapdragon with 384MB main memory and it is a technological wonder during its launch. 8 months later, X10 still decent enough to run any application available on android market. However its 1GB internal storage greatly limits the application storage since X10 has no froyo in the pipeline. In the imaging department, 8MP is probably the best camera you can get in the android line up. With Sony Ericsson reputation of implementing phone camera, this is one of the key feature many choosed this phone over its competitors.
All this computing prowess is displayed on a massive 4" LCD with 854x480 resolution. The screen is capable to display 16Million color but is currently running on 65K for reasons only god knows why. Since sony manufactures SuperLCD, really makes one wonder why it isnt featured in their own flagship mobile. LCD is a pretty obsolete technology and is slowly being phrase out from flagship mobile devices due to poor performance and high power consumption.
Mulitouch is not supported so no pinch to zoom and limiting the library of games availabe. However a compromise is in the works, slated to be released on 2011. Even single touch is pretty inaccurate at times, resulting in fustruating moments typing on the virtual keyboard.
Powering the device is a 1500mah lithium polymer. Although Lit Pol has no battery memory, it is still advisable to drain full cycle a few times. By default, the battery life of half a day is pretty horrendous for such a huge capacity. A few steps like removing timescape automatic connection to social feeds and changing the ancient LCD to automatic brightness mode increases it to a full day of moderate use. I went further by removing bloatwares, using task killer and using a widget to switch off my internet connection when not required. This result in 2 days of battery life with moderate use or 1 day of heavy use when stuck in some boring social events.
SD card hotswap is impossible since it is blocked by the battery. The loudspeaker and earphone seems to come from the same source, and its performance is abmysal. Not only will you have difficulty hearing your phone ringing, you probably cant hear the conversation on the phone either. Audio output from 3.5" jack isnt terrific either with contant noise in the background and the soundstage feels tiny.
Camera
With 2.1Eclair, X10 finally unlocks the ability to record video in 720P. However, the hardware isnt optimised with the new workload and the video may occassionally drop to a lower resolution in certain scenarios. Autofocus is still working on 720P due to the ability of reducing resolution when the cpu reaches its bottleneck.
The software implementation in generally good, other than a few weird issues. To enable camera flash, you have to navigate a few layers of menu and you have to enable everytime you use your camera. Theres a 2 second lag when changing orientation of the phone which its caused still a mystery. Since the phone already suffers from poor startup time for the camera, this additional delay simply make things worst.
Camera's picture quality is simply awesome. Auto focus allows decent photos to be taken at a close range of 10cm. There are also various focus mode to choose from, but the leaving it at single point focus mode work greats most of the time. Under great lighting condition, anti shake actually works and auto focus intelligently identify your target. But things get nasty in dark lighting condition. Anti shake and auto focus will start behaving erratically as the camera's ISO and exposure probably adjusted itself to compensate the tiny CCD. Of course, thats a norm in phone cameras and what X10 offers is as good as it gets.
Below are some preview pictures taken on X10
Dayshot
Nightshot
Macro shot @10cm
Macro shot @15cm
Under flourescent lamp
Shots with flash
Software
Thought i may have listed quite a number of negative issues plaguing the hardware, i am largely positive and satisfied with the them. The same cannot be said for its software.
One can partly blame google for this fragmented mess for the android OS, but OEM take the bulk of the blame. They generally concentrate on their new flagship and leaving the older low end models stuck with obsolete android version. Custom OEM skin simply make things worst due to their small developing team but other business factors also comes into play.
Surprisingly, the current flagship from Sony Ericsson is using obsolete version of android throughout its life. Lets put the nightmare of 1.6D behind and concentrate on the "newest" built based on the 2.1E. 2.1E increase the library of applications greatly while adding quite an impressive list of features. After several delays and widespread adoption of 2.2F for every OEM flagship, X10 finally recieves its 2.1E. With 2.1E, you get 720P video recording, more home screen and of course the bug fixes that comes with it. Sony Ericsson updated its horrendous timescape and mediascape software, but it is no where comparable to alternatives on the market. Timescape is one of the least efficient way to display your friends update, not to mention its performance is choppy. Mediascape is a decent media hub, but lacks settings like equalizer and integration of controls on the lockscreen. The X10 lockscreen is updated to a vertical slide action, sliding the opposite action will also silence your phone.
Sounds impressive, but other OEM flagship customers have been enjoying these features of Android 2.X since last october and Sony Ericsson "exclusive" features is just a click away on android market. To add salt to the injury, 2.3G is on the horizon just when X10 recieves its update. The lack of any massive custom skinning on X10 GUI is really puzzling since their developers seems to have such massive problem catching up with the rest of the OEM. No matter how you look at it, timescape and mediascape is not a complex piece of software nor worth the delay.
The only redeeming attribute is the current built of OS is rock solid with no random slowdowns. While other flagship like Samsung galaxy S running the newest 2.2F is still plagued with frequent crashes. With some additional effort, X10 users can attain the snappy GUI enjoyed by 2.2F. This include installing task killers and removing auto start bloatware by rooting your phone. Of course, the lack of flash player and JIT compiler is a real disappointment.
With 2.3G approaching, X10 users can only hope google start imposing some regulations in terms of OS upgrade to end their misery. Alternatively you can stop and stare in awe since 2.1E is probably the only android platform X10 will ever get.
Conclusion
Generally, i would not recommend purchasing this phone even after its 2.1E upgrade. Your phone is stuck at android 2.1E for rest of its life, and the bootloader have not been cracked to allow custom ROM. But if you want a good camera on android platform, you may want to consider the X10. In singapore, ISP will sweeten the deal by subsidizing for almost 400SGD with the cheapest data price plan. This will result in the phone costing only 150SGD. In this case, X10 becomes an attractive offer as it is the only phone at that price range with 4" LCD and 1Ghz CPU. Things are not rosy when purchasing the phone without ISP contract, as its retail price of 600SGD which is similar to phones like HTC desire that offers android 2.2F and some lower end offering on windows 7 mobile platform.
Score:
Physical design-9/10
Hardware-8/10
Camera-9/10
Software-5/10
Overall-7/10
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