Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 preview: First look

Design and construction

The XPERIA X10 is anything else but a compact handset - but that's expected in a device with a 4" display. Still, due to the curved edges, the phone feels extra thin despite the fact that a girth of 13mm is not ground-breaking (the Toshiba TG01 is 9.9mm).

The XPERIA X10 is also impressively light for its huge screen real estate, so much so that it feels almost plasticy. But don't let that sound bad, we really liked how the X10 felt and handled.

The XPERIA X10 is the second Android handset sporting a resolution of 854x480 pixels. Believe it or not, that resolution has been a set standard even before the X10 and the Motorola Droid/MILESTONE came to being. It's even got its own abbreviation FWVGA - short for Full Wide VGA, which simply denotes it's got pure 16:9 aspect ratio. That FWVGA resolution is actually quite common among widescreen multimedia projectors.

By the way, don't miss checking out the cool lockscreen on the second image below.

Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10: a device with an extra large display, but with an extra thin waistline

The 8 megapixel camera lens is on the back of the XPERIA X10. There's also a tiny LED flash here, to keep the lens company. On the top of the device, there is a standard microUSB port, a 3.5mm audio jack and a huge on/off key.

Interestingly, that right there is the only the second Sony Ericsson handset to use a microUSB port (though there should be more to come in 2010). The first one was its XPERIA X2 cousin.

When asked, Sony Ericsson explained they've designed, constructed and manufactured the X10 from the ground up all by themselves and they're not relying on another company such as HTC to do the manufacturing this time.

Sony Ericson XPERIA X10: an 8 megapixel camera and a microUSB port on top

Obviously using Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 for web browsing will be a real treat. In fact there are a lot of websites that will fit into 848 pixels worth of width without having a side scrollbar. It almost feels as if next year we'll be seeing mobile phones matching the resolution of your regular netbook, doesn't it?

Browsing GSMArena.com on the 4-inch FWVGA display is a nice experience

You're welcome to jump over to the next page, where we'll give the Sony Ericsson Android UI a quick rundown coupled with some videos for an extra treat.

Hands-on video

While we have the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 covered on the next page, here's a low down of what the device all about.

Customized Android OS 1.6, but no multi-touch

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 runs on the user-friendly Android 1.6 OS (codenamed Donut). Unfortunately, version 2.0 is still a no-go for the time being and there are no plans for an official upgrade to the latest version.

Another nasty surprise is that the OS won't be making use of multi-touch gestures such as pinch zooming in the web browser and gallery.

That being said, Sony Ericsson still had some impressive new UI all set on the Android phone and though it still needed a lot of polishing around the edges, it surely showed some nice potential.

Timescape is a user interface (or simply put - an application) that brings all your communications together. It gets activated by pressing the Timescape widget on the homescreen and displays an aggregated view of your SMS, MMS, email, missed calls, Facebook updates and Twitter updates all on one screen. A longer press on a tile lets you preview its content.

Sony Ericsson proprietary Timescape UI for XPERIA X10

You can easily filter the displayed stuff by event types or by contacts (strangely called Infinite view).

The following video we took should give you a good idea of what the Timescape UI is all about: