For better or for worse, Sony Ericsson isn’t exactly the first name that comes to mind for me when I think about smartphones. That’s not to say that the company doesn’t make quality handsets; it’s just that I’m more familiar with the Walkman line of music phones and the Cyber-shot line of camera phones. Well, they’ve got a hot smartphone too and it is known as the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1.
When the XPERIA first hit the market, you could have expected to pay about $1,000 for it. That’s quite the premium for a smartphone, but the price has thankfully come down substantially since then. In fact, you can find the XPERIA online for about $500 these days and, if you’re willing to sign a contract, some carriers will sell it to you for $200 to $300 with a service agreement.
How does Sony Ericsson’s major smartphone entry compare against its Nokia, iPhone, and BlackBerry competitors? Let’s find out.
Checking Out the Features
On paper, the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 brings a heck of a lot to the table, boasting a high resolution camera, touchscreen display, QWERTY keyboard, and a unique user interface. It really sounds like it has everything you’d want in a phone.
- Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional
- Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, tri-band HSDPA
- 3.0-inch 800×480 TFT resistive touchscreen
- Slide-out full QWERTY keyboard
- Optical trackpad
- 3.5mm audio jack
- 256MB RAM, 512MB ROM
- microSD memory card expansion slot
- 802.11b/g Wi-Fi
- Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP
- 3.15 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash and 30fps VGA video
- Qualcomm MSM 7200 528MHz processor
- Stereo FM radio with RDS
- Pocket Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, PDF Viewer)
- Up to 833 hours standby, up to 10 hours talk time
The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1, which is actually sourced out to HTC of Taiwan, is available in Solid Black (as shown) and Steel Silver.
What Accessories Are Included?
As if the spec sheet and feature set weren’t enough to whet your whistle with interest, it’s also nice to see that Sony Ericsson didn’t skimp out too much on the free bundled accessories.
Inside the cleverly designed box, you’ll find three distinct compartments to house the various elements. A padded portion is dedicated to showcasing the phone itself. In one of the bigger boxes inside, you get a USB cable, wall charger adapter (which uses the USB cable), an extra stylus, earphones, ear tips for the earphones, and a headphone extension cable that contains the remote and microphone for handsfree voice calls.
In a separate box, you get an installation CD and all sorts of supporting documentation. Strangely, you don’t get a single unified instruction manual; it’s broken down into several smaller booklets.
There are still a few missing elements here that you’ll need to buy yourself, however. If you plan on watching any movies, listening to any music, or snapping more than a handful of high resolution pictures, you’ll want to invest in a large microSD memory card. To protect it from bumps and bruises, a protective case of some kind might be useful too.
Accessing the microSD Expansion Slot
Although I appreciate the availability of memory expansion on this phone, the placement of the card slot is less than ideal. On some phones, this slot is tucked behind the battery. Thankfully, that’s not the case here, but it’s not immediately accessible either.
You have to remove the battery cover in order to access the card slot on the side. On my Nokia E71, there is a small protective flap over the side-mounted card slot, but I don’t have to take off the battery cover to get to it. I would have preferred that kind of implementation on the XPERIA too.
Call Quality and Reception
Personally, I use my smartphone for text messages, web surfing, and sending emails more than I use it for actual voice calls, but I guess that’s still a pretty important part of being a phone. With the XPERIA X1, I can’t really complain on any front here.
The virtual dial pad will be a familiar one for anyone who has used a Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional handset and reception was about as good as any other phone that I have used. Voice quality was good on both ends and I was able to hear the other party loud and clear.
QWERTY Keyboard and Touchscreen
Can’t decide if you prefer a smartphone with a full QWERTY keyboard or a smartphone with a large touchscreen display? Most BlackBerry devices offer the former whereas devices like the iPhone boast the latter. With the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1, you get both… sort of.
The hardware keyboard slides out of the side of the XPERIA, getting the touchscreen display to automatically re-orient itself to landscape rather than portrait. There’s also a slide curve to this, so the screen is tilted ever so slightly when you have the keyboard exposed.
Although I am usually a fan of HTC keyboards, I can’t say that I really like the one on this phone. There’s not very much key travel, largely because the keys are almost flush with the surface. The size of the tab, shift, and @ keys along the left side also make for an awkward placement of the “A” and “Z” keys. I suppose I could get used to this over time, but I had quite a few typos sending text messages and composing email messages. I like physical keyboards, but not this one.
My experience with the touchscreen wasn’t much better. This is not a finger-friendly capacitive touchscreen like what you get with the Apple iPhone. Instead, it’s a resistive touchscreen that is best used with a stylus (or a fingernail). You need this kind of precision for handwriting recognition, but it can be frustrating at times.
Resistive touchscreens make for visibility challenges in brighter conditions and I found that it had a hard time registering presses along the edges. This may have been improved with a screen that is flush with the surface of the phone, like what you get with the HTC Touch Pro.
Using the 3.2 Megapixel Camera
Given the popularity of mobile Twitter clients and the sharing of pictures through Facebook, you may want to have a good camera on your smartphone. On paper, the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 offers just that with a 3.2-megapixel shooter complete with autofocus and flash. Unfortunately, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be as you can see below…
While I appreciate the ability to use selective focus by tapping on the screen, the resulting picture isn’t exactly the best. That’s a sample shot above. This was with a fair deal of natural light and no flash, but the result has a distinct blue hue to it. Given the quality of Cyber-shot camera phones, I thought Sony Ericsson would do better than this.
For now, the reigning smartphone champ in the camera department still seems to be the iPhone 3GS.
Introducing the Panels Interface
And this is really what is supposed to set the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 smartphone apart from its competition. While it still utilizes Windows Mobile 6.1 at its core, this phone comes with a new user interface overlay called Panels.
On the surface, this may sound like it’s same idea as the HTC TouchFLO 3D, but it really is something else entirely. Instead of having a single home screen, you can dynamically swap between different specialized home screens by hitting the Panel key next to Talk button.
Several different Panels are pre-installed on the phone. My personal favorite, based on its sheer utility, is the Sony Ericsson Panel 2. This offers an at-a-glance look at the calendar, upcoming appointments, time, weather, RSS feeds, to-do lists, and shortcuts to your frequently used applications.
Some of the other Panels include the Google Panel, which looks just like the Google homepage and adds in quick access to Gmail, Google Maps, and more; the 3D Fish Panel, which simplifies everything down to a few fish that are meant to indicate different status items; the Media Xperience Panel, which provides non-stop access to all your media; and the XperiaRadio Panel, which is designed with FM radio in mind.
These are all kind of neat, but there is noticeable lag when you swap between the different Panels. The Panels interface also thinly veils the Windows Mobile 6.1 platform, so you don’t have to go far into the menus before you find yourself in generic Windows-land.
Surfing the Mobile Web
This isn’t entirely the fault of Sony Ericsson (or HTC), but the web surfing experience on the XPERIA X1 can leave a lot to be desired. The screen size isn’t horrible for a smartphone, since you get a three-inch diagonal and an 800 x 480 pixel resolution, but Internet Explorer is far from ideal.
As you can see from the shot above, the mobile version of IE doesn’t exactly know how to render Futurelooks.com. Since you are using a resistive touchscreen, you’ll also want to use the stylus if you want any semblance of precision when clicking on links. It works, I suppose, but it doesn’t work very well.
That said, you have other options when it comes to web browsers on Windows Mobile 6.1. I’d imagine that pages would render a little better if you were to opt for Opera Mobile, which is thankfully free to download.
It should be noted that, unlike the iPhone and BlackBerry, there is yet to be a dedicated app store for Windows Mobile and Sony Ericsson. In this way, you’ll need to go hunting for your apps on your own.
What About Battery Life?
When you enter into the arena of 3G smartphones, you know you have to make certain sacrifices when it comes to battery life. You have to remember that you are getting a lot more, in terms of functionality, compared to conventional non-smartphones. This is particularly true because Wi-Fi and 3G tend to be really huge battery hogs.
With the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1, you get a standard 1500mAh battery. That’s the same capacity as the standard batteries for the Nokia E71, BlackBerry Bold, and a number of other similar handsets. Even so, I was reasonably happy with the kind of battery life that I managed to pull out of the XPERIA. With moderate combined usage, I was able to go almost two full days before requiring a charge.
During those two days, I made a few voice calls, surfed the web for a few hours over 3G, and played the FM radio for a few hours. Doing the same with some other 3G smartphones, you can only expect to last about a day or a day and a half. Naturally, if you’re streaming a lot of media or otherwise making constant use of the camera, web browser, or other power-hungry applications, your mileage will vary accordingly.
Final Thoughts
There’s no way that I would have ever spent $1,000 on the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 when it was first released and even now that it’s been out for a few months and the price has come down, it’s still difficult to recommend this phone over several other suitable alternatives.
The hardware appears to be very well built and I have every confidence that the robust sliding mechanism for the keyboard will hold up to regular wear and tear. The Panels UI is a neat innovation, but you are still dealing with Windows Mobile 6.1 at its core… complete with all the quirks and bugs that we’ve come to love tolerate.
The keyboard isn’t as good as the HTC Touch Pro, the camera leaves much to be desired, and the resistive touchscreen isn’t even flush with the surface of the phone. It’s a nice “first try” for Sony Ericsson, but I hope that they make significant improvements for the XPERIA X2.
Pros
- Full QWERTY keyboard slides out the side
- Unique Sony Ericsson Panels user interface
- Plenty of built-in features, including camera and FM radio
- Phone feels very solid in hands
Cons
- Keyboard doesn’t offer enough key travel, has awkward layout
- Camera takes pictures with blue tinge
- Resistive touchscreen can be frustrating to use
- Still Windows Mobile 6.1
Overall Rating: 7.0/10
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Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 Smartphone Photo Gallery
