Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 preview: First look

Customized Android OS 1.6, but no multi-touch (continued)

Quite similarly called, Mediascape gathers all your media together. Music photos and video each have a dedicated homescreen divided in two parts – local and online.

Sony Ericsson proprietary Mediascape UI for XPERIA X10

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

Camera

A clever automatic face recognition system has been integrated in the images department as well, recognizing up to five faces in any image. Once you name each of those faces, it goes ahead and recognizes all its appearances in your phone gallery. What's even more, tapping on the face on any of those photos afterwards, allows you to call or text that person.

Sony Ericsson are also promising that the 8 megapixel camera on the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 will have all the features you would expect from a Cyber-shot cameraphone including, but not limited to, Face and smile detection and Touch focus.

Sony Ericson XPERIA X10 camera interface

We were unable to take any photos and videos with the XPERIA X10 during its official announcement but, luckily, we managed to find some nice camera samples (Thanks, Sony Ericsson!). However, don't forget that those have been shot with a pre-release unit (probably like the one we are now previewing) so don't be so picky and just enjoy them.

Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 camera samples

The photos certainly look great for a pre-production unit. The amount of resolved detail is pretty satisfying, although not as impressive as it was on the Sony Ericsson Aino. We are pretty pleased with color saturation as well.

The noise levels are pretty decent with chroma (colored) noise almost nowhere to be seen on these shots.

The first three shots were probably taken with a different metering mode enabled as the handset tried to retain as much detail as possible, resulting in a flat and unrealistic image. While it will give you more headroom in post-processing we are pretty certain that most of the users would prefer the punchier output, witnessed in the last couple of shots.

When it comes to the video, it is recorded in WVGA 800 x 480 pixel resolution at almost 30 fps (about 28fps to be exact). And here you can download the full resolution sample itself.

Final words

Well, it's been nice to check out what Sony Ericsson have been up to lately. From what we see they certainly have been hard at work in the upper segment of their portfolio and we really like to think that they've been equaly hard laboring in the midrange behind closed doors. Anyways, the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 might as well be their magnum opus after a long period of setbacks and we really hope it will get them back on track. We quite enjoyed what we saw and we're looking forward to seeing some more once the X10 gets a more polished custom UI and more balanced performance. Hopefully, it should be out on the market some time in February.