Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 - The Android Landscape

An Android Experience

In the short three-month space since we began the year, it would seem as though Google's Android has been dominating the mobile scene. While Microsoft is gearing up for its upcoming Windows Phone 7 and Samsung kick starts their own open-source platform, bada, we've been seeing Android devices that were once announced and now finally available in the market. One such device that we're looking at today is the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10. We did an earlier detailing most of the aesthetics of the phone, and briefly touched upon its unique Timescape and Mediascape interface. In this round, we take a detailed look at the performance and features of Sony Ericsson's flagship Android device.

The Human Touch

We covered much of the design aspect of the X10 in our earlier preview. But for convenience, here's a quick recap of the X10's human curvature design. A straight-on flat surface with curves running along its sides and rear portrays a fine balance of sophistication and build quality on the X10. Its human curvature design does fit into the palm nicely, if you have a sizeable hand to grasp the X10 and its 4-inch capacitive screen. Also, its physical buttons were adequately raised for easy access.

Master of Time and Media

Our earlier preview of both the Timescape and Mediascape was limited due to the device's early developmental nature. Now with the final unit in our hands, we will be delving deeper into the X10's unique feature that combines your communications and multimedia content into a single timeline.

Let's take a look at Timescape. To recap, Timescape allows you to add various accounts such as email, Facebook and Twitter on top of the phone's standard messaging and call notifications. In total, there are seven specific tiles within Timescape, which includes Twitter, Facebook, Call Log, Messaging, Email, Camera and Music. Within Timescape, you can also customize the displayed content. In our case, we'd prefer to keep the layout to be as minimal as possible. There are two ways to go about this. You can customize the main tile to display specific feeds. By doing so, you could remove the corresponding tiles to keep the interface clean and simple.

Alternatively, you can sort through the information that you really need, and remove the tiles that aren't often in use. In reality, we'd rather populate Timescape with communication-focused tiles such as Email, Facebook, Twitter, Messaging and Call Log. Multimedia content such as Music and Camera are more suited to be explored in the Mediascape interface.

If you remember, we did talk about the expanded features of Timescape when you click on the infinity logo on a specific contact. You'll then be directed to a page where anything pertaining to that specific contact is listed. This includes all the accounts you've added, including Facebook and Twitter. Unfortunately, with the different handles that people take on for their online persona and real life identity, you'll probably spend more time trying to link up your contacts to the respective online accounts.

We've also managed to touch on Mediascape in our earlier preview. As its name implies, this interface focuses upon the multimedia content within the X10, segregated into Music, Video and Photo. Each tab is further segmented, and depending on the specific tab, you get a list of your most recently played or recently added media. Under the same tab, you'll find the PlayNow music download service. There isn't much to relay with the Video tab, but moving on to the Photos section, and you'll have more options to explore. Mediascape also ties back to your online accounts, displaying any online photo albums from your logged-in Facebook or Picasa accounts.

Likewise, there's also an infinity icon that expands the multimedia options with the X10. In particular, any song that you expand upon will initiate a search based on the artist. This includes any other songs sharing the same artist on your memory card, via the PlayNow music service, and related videos on YouTube. If all else fails, there is always a web search, which crawls through Google to find a match.

Molding the Android

We've heard much about the software aspect of the X10, but for both Timescape and Mediascape to work seamlessly, you'll need solid performing hardware to accompany it. What the X10 has within its core is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz processor. We've seen Android devices that are perfectly capable of handling themselves without the power of the Snapdragon processors, so with the X10 using this, what we are looking at is not just performance, but its reliability on the road.

With its 1GHz processor, we are expecting some blazing fast speeds. Navigating the usual Android interface netted the usual speeds, with no visible lags or slowdown when we flipped through the limited three-page layout. If you're not a heavy app downloader or user, the lack of pages for you to anchor your widgets or apps onto shouldn't pose that big an issue. What should concern you is the performance of the Timescape interface. With Timescape downloading your updates from Facebook and Twitter in the background, we noticed a tremendous slowdown in the Timescape interface. This essentially puts the whole interface on hold until the update is fully loaded. Though Timescape went back to its smooth operation right after, it does dampen the otherwise fast and intuitive user interface.

Sony Ericsson's track record in multimedia delivery should put the X10 at some advantage, and that it did. While we weren't too thrilled with its PlayNow service, the Mediascape concept freshens up the mundane Android music player interface. Its audio capabilities were above average, and combining this with the clear and sufficently sized 800 x 480 pixels 4.0-inch touchscreen, and it's a given that the X10 will be fared quite well in the multimedia department.

Located at the rear of the X10 is an 8-megapixel camera, which makes it the first Android device that goes beyond the usual 5-megapixel sensors. Fortunately, the X10 is equipped with an LED flash for good measure, and that will give it a slight advantage for shots in the dark (though not too dark). As usual, we put the phone's camera through our resolution and color chart, and a specific test shot to gauge its imaging capabilities.

From what we saw on the resolution chart, we have to say the X10's camera came through with solid detail levels and sharpness. Noise control was handled well as seen on the dark areas of the color charts. For color reproduction, we noticed warm and reddish hues to its images, and this is noticable on both the color chart and the standard test image we took.

Here comes the real deal - the X10's battery life. Smartphone users all over the world would always have one thing on their mind - just how long can the device survive on one single charge? This is especially important for Android devices, which constantly pull data from the Google server to synchronize your emails and contacts. In doing so, the biggest concern would be the battery life. This is more pronounced for the X10, which uses a 1GHz processor and a sizably large screen, and thankfully powered by a 1500mAh battery. We sized it up alongside a few other devices of its range for battery life comparisons starting off with our grueling video looping test.

The results are obvious for all - the X10 won't be suitable for heavy usage on the road. Clocking 2 hours 35 minutes for our battery test and considering its higher battery capacity, the X10 is ranked lower than devices such as the HTC HD2 and Google Nexus One with similar (or larger) screen sizes and lower battery capacity. While it's not surprising to see how the Motorola Milestone managed to fare better with its smaller screen and managable processor, it's still a good indication of how the X10 fares against its Android siblings. For the moment, the Google Nexus One claims ownership of the best battery performance and portability index of almost all Android devices out there.

The X10's battery benchmark results were reflected in our daily usage scenrios too. We started off the morning with a full charge, but found it wanting for more power in less than 12 hours! The hours were spent with internet usage for the constant Google Sync and some data downloads from our Twitter feed, intermittent calls, messaging and music thrown in. Now, if you were to keep a close watch on your usage pattern, you could enhance the X10's power efficiency by deactivating Google Sync and Twitter, ensure your Wi-Fi and Bluetooth is off and push your screen brightness to the minimum. In other words, you'll be using a phone, not a smartphone.

The Finishing Touch

The appearance of the new Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini and X10 mini pro are definite proof of the company's Android strategy, but before they do focus their attention on these two smaller offerings, the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 will have a few things to prove. Aesthetically speaking, its straight-on flat surface with curves running along its sides, while the rear portrays a fine balance of sophistication and build quality. The human curvature design does fit into the palm nicely, if you have a sizeable hand to grasp the X10 and its 4-inch capacitive touchscreen. What we do we bemoan is the lack of a physical Search button which could speed up the process of a contact or file search within the X10.

Android devices have performed reasonably well even with a moderate processor. Using a 1GHz processor, the X10 felt snappy and was quick in responding with the stock interface from Google. Sadly, the Timescape interface is both a boon and a bane to the user. It does make it easier for you to access all your content in one single timeline, but gets too overwhelming if you have too many news feeds to go through one after another. And we did experience periods of lagging when Timescape is heavily loaded with feeds across its channels.

The similar Mediascape interface displays multimedia content and delivers more with online media from Sony Ericsson's PlayNow portal. Within both Timescape and Mediascape, you can click on an infinity icon which is an extension of the UI. This gives you the option to link up a specific Facebook or Twitter entry with your Contact list. Within Mediascape, you can also pull up a list of related media on the web for the music or video that you were enjoying.

Taking everything into consideration, the X10 has the makings of a good multimedia-centric phone, with its comfortable screen size, great audio and video capabilities and its splendid imaging performance. But toss in the low battery mileage, the occasioanl lag during Timescape's data updates, and you'll see why the X10 isn't able to give the Nexus One some well-needed competition.

The X10 also stands out as one of the pricier Android phones with its S$1,088 price tag. In comparison, one might see the Nexus One as the more affordable choice. But do remember that the X10 does come with a price subsidy under a two-year telco contract, which is also likely for the upcoming HTC Desire. But for those of us in Singapore, here's a little bonus - the X10 is tied in with local telco SingTel's own music download service, SingTel AMPed, which is a similar feature to Sony Ericsson's own PlayNow service. It does come with a slight advantage, which is no data costs involved. Though the X10 is currently running on the older Google Android 1.6 OS, Sony Ericsson did mention an Android 2.0 update in the near future, sans multi-touch interface on its Timescape interface.

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