Hands on: Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 (Rachael) review

Posted by Joe Svetlik on Tue 3 Nov 2009

Adding another Android to the mix

Sony Ericsson has just unveiled its first handset to run Android, and we’ve had a go with it. Named the Xperia X10, or Rachael if you’re using Sony Ericsson’s odd names for each model, it packs a Toshiba TG01-matching 4-inch touchscreen, 8-megapixel camera, and some rather cool new apps.

The phone promises to bring all your entertainment and communication together, which translates as running Google’s open source Android software to download any app you want. There's also three of Sony Ericsson’s own come built-in apps: Timescape, Mediascape, and Face Recognition.

Timescape is the most interesting, basically showing all your correspondence in one place, so click on a contact and you’re faced with all texts, emails, phone calls, Twitter and Facebook updates in one handy place. You can filter by communication type (just see emails from them, for example), or show them all stacked up like a pile of paper.

Mediascape is a similar aggregating tool for your media. As well as showing you all media stored on your phone, it’ll recommend other music and movies you might like online. Listen to a song by an artist, and you’ll be given links to interviews with them on YouTube, for example. And click on a tagged photo of someone and you can see all of their tagged pics on one place, as well as phone them by tapping their face using the in-built Face Recognition, which can identify up to five people in a photo. Handy.

“It’s a mashed-up communication experience,” said Steve Walker, head of portfolio planning at Sony Ericsson. We’re not sure about that – it looked to us like a slightly jazzier version of HTC’s ‘people centric’ phonebook as found on its Touch Pro 2. But Sony Ericsson is promising more of this kind of intelligence as the software evolves.

At 4-inches, the touchscreen is huge, and although it’s capacitive, there’s no multi-touch, so no pinching to zoom. The model we saw was pre-production, so software was pretty ropey as is to be expected, but the menus did look clear and very nicely designed. It’ll run Android 1.6 when it launches in February 2010 (Sony Ericsson says version 2.0 of Android doesn’t support the screen’s aspect ratio, but it will upgrade when it does), and the name of Sony Ericsson’s software is yet to be announced – currently it’s calling it UX platform, but says that will change before launch. Inside is a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, it has an SD card slot (an 8GB card will come in the box), and it’ll come in black and white.

Sony Ericsson also announced this is the flagship in a family of Android phones shipping in the first half of next year, so look out for some lower specced models accompanying it onto the shelves.

Link: Sony Ericsson