Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 - Review

Phone Arena is testing and reviewing mobile phones for you. This video focus' on the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1.

Welcome to the phonearena.com video review of the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1. The X1 is Sony’s first four A in the Windows Mobile. And man, did they came out of the gates swinging? The X1 is a beautifully crafted device. It’s all metal frame gives it a very hefty 5.1 ounce weight. It may be a little bit on the heavy side but the solid construction goes well with it. It has a side sliding full QWERTY keyboard. And is one of the better ones we’ve ever used. While the keys are a little bit shallow, it’s still extremely easy to type on and the buttons are very functional. The slide mechanism is excellent. It feels fantastic. There is a lot of weight behind it but springs right into place. On the left side, we find the Micro USB charging port, excuse us, Mini USB charging port and a single speaker. On the right is a volume rocker which is a little small for our taste. It could have been a little bit longer but it’s still not too bad. Down at the bottom, we have the camera button and that’s it for the physical keys. On the back, we find the 3.2MP camera. The camera has auto-focus and a flash, although picture results were somewhat disappointing. The top of the device features the power button as well as a 3.5mm headphone jack. And in the corner is the stylus. The stylus is a bit hard to get out, as is the battery cover. You have to pry your fingers underneath especially those of us who may have just cut our fingernails, this is a trying thing. As you can see we have that off but it wasn’t easy as moving the world. Underneath, there is the MicroSD expansion slot. It ships with a 4GB card which is plenty for most people. It is however expandable to bigger sizes. Putting the battery door back on again is an issue as it doesn’t completely sit right until you really put a lot of pressure on it. Overall, we really, really like the design of the X1. It feels great in the hands. It’s quite narrow and it just feels wonderful. One of the distinguishing features of the X1 is its screen. It’s a gorgeous 3-inch WVGA screen, which means 480x800 pixels in resolution. It is of course touch sensitive and it’s a resistive sensitive screen as opposed the capacitive. Another standout feature is the panel interface that Sony has developed for this. As you saw, we are on a fairly standard Windows Mobile home screen but by clicking the panel button, we have all kinds of different screens that we can go to. Let’s pull up one of the Sony Ericsson screens. So you can see it takes just a second to load but now we a customized display. We’ve chosen to display Weather, Time, Calendar, some communication functions and have a launcher for recent programs. As we go back to the interface, there are other panels as well. We have Dashwire, Google and Windows Live. We especially like to see something like Dashwire on this. Another excellent screen is the Facebook panel which is easily the best mobile implementation we’ve seen of the social networking site yet. As you can see it logged us in and all of our friends are flying in and bouncing off of us. That’s a pretty cool visual representation but it’s also very useful. We can tap on any of them when you need their information. There is also this tab screen similar to our homepage where we can get their status updates, check our profile information or pull up our whole file in—once we click on a friend, we can see all of their information almost like we can on a PC. It’s easy to send messages, poke someone and view walls. As we go back to the main panel menu here, we’ll check out another cool panel. It’s Sony’s media panel. The layout is similar to that of the PlayStation 3 or other Sony device that have recently come out. We can check our Pictures, Music, Videos, Games, Contacts and we have our Settings. Let’s check out the music player first. It sorts by Artist, Album, Tracks and all the usual standards. We will say that of the six test albums that we always load on our devices, it only recognize the album art for one. All the ID3 tags were rendered properly however, so this was a fairly minor grape. The inner space is a little bit busy for our taste. There is a lot going on here. But in general, everything works well. The sound quality was also excellent via both of our—both our included headphones as well as personal headphones that we own. The video player we have a small complain about. First off, the fact that it’s only 65,000 colors does degrade from some of the quality. However, videos still look very good on the wide screen. To bring a player controls however, you actually have to tap the screen which pauses the video. We’re not a fan of this especially since we have to control the volume through this. The volume rocker on the side has the system volume controls but it does not manipulate the controls within the video player. All in all, the X1 is still a very good media device. That was definitely one of Sony Ericsson’s play ends for it and they achieved that well. On the whole, we’re very impressed with Sony’s debut in the Windows Mobile. The X1 is a beautifully crafted device, although we have to let you know that they had helped with HTC for the design and manufacturing of the X1. The software is of Sony though. We do like the panel interface. It’s not quite as good as the TouchFLO 3D. However, it does offer a lot of cool options. And we think that between the two, it would be excellent to combine them. The size and weight are near perfect. It’s a little bit heavy but it still feels very good in the hands, especially due to its narrowness. The keypad like we said is one of the better ones we’ve ever use. There is also some cool features like this optical joystick here. They do call it a mouse. However, you move left and right and up and down, so it’s more just like a touch pad. Whatever it is, it’s a cool design innovation and we hope to see it in the future. We look forward to more devices from Sony and the X2 and beyond.