Sony Ericsson Experia X1

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Sony Ericsson Experia X1 Dimensions (w/h/d): 53 x 110 x 17 Weight: 145g Talk Time: 10 hours Stand By: 833 hours Camera: Camera Resolution: Handset Type: Standard Coverage (Band): Quad Video Camera: Bluetooth: Mp3 Player: Mp3 Ringtones: MMS: Java Games: Radio: GPRS: Email: Internet Browsing: 3G: Memory Slot: WiFi:

Dimensions (w/h/d): Weight: Talk Time: Stand By: Camera: Camera Resolution: Phone Type: Coverage (Band): Video Camera: Bluetooth: Mp3 Player: Mp3 Ringtones: MMS: Java Games: Radio: GPRS: Email: Internet Browsing: 3G: Memory Slot: WiFi:

Dimensions (w/h/d): Weight: Talk Time: Stand By: Camera: Camera Resolution: Phone Type: Coverage (Band): Video Camera: Bluetooth: Mp3 Player: Mp3 Ringtones: MMS: Java Games: Radio: GPRS: Email: Internet Browsing: 3G: Memory Slot: WiFi:

Our Review of the Sony Ericsson Experia X1

Everything about the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 screams "enterprise phone" - if you're having trouble convincing your CEO to stretch for iPhones for the workforce, then shove an X1 in his face and you are likely to make him a convert.

The Sony Ericsson Xperia X1: Should it have been called an AppleBerry?

Mobile Phones Hands-On Review with Peter White.

The Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 is a quality touchscreen phone that has been depicted as being just as desirable to music and gadget lovers as it is to the enterprise users, who will love it for its Microsoft Windows familiarity. The problem is that any attempt to merge these two worlds is pretty much doomed to failure.

If you are having trouble convincing your CEO to stretch for iPhones for the workforce, then shove an Xperia in his face and you are likely to make him a convert. But don't throw away your old Sony Ericsson Walkman phone, you'll need it for the intuitive interface and the music.

First Impressions

Like most modern, top of the range handsets, when you first receive the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1, it feels special, like you shouldn't take off the screen cover, or open the back to put in the battery, frightened of harming the device. But as you get to know the Xperia X1 you begin to wish it were not so hardy, and it’s easy to convince yourself that any damage caused by throwing it across the room in frustration would be justified.

The problem, as it has been so often before, lies in using the Windows operating system for a phone, and not sufficiently disguising the fact, and also because being a Windows touch screen phone, it has tiny screen icons which cannot be addressed with fingers touching the screen, which leaves the owner of the Xperia tied to a plastic tipped stylus, which you just know you are going to lose within 24 hours, without which the device loses at least half its function.

On the other hand there are things that recommend the phone, and there will be people that come to love it, it's just that I won't be one of them. What Sony Ericsson was looking for here is someone that has a Blackberry and was thinking about buying an iPhone, but can't afford it. Oh yeah, except that the Xperia at £500 is twice the price of an iPhone. So perhaps it’s for someone who has to use it for work and needs it to offer push email and all the enterprise Windows applications. Oh yes, there are plenty of people that come into that category.

However at most times in the emotional world of choosing a handset, and especially in the approaching recession, what handset vendors do NOT need are people to go rationally about their business, carefully weighing the pros and cons of four or five devices, and measuring them against the price and finally making their choice entirely based on logic.

What handset vendors DO need are slavering fanatics, one side of the touch screen religious war or the other, who will queue all night just to be the first in their town to have whatever gizmo it is they have fallen in love with. For this type of frenzied follower of handset fashion the Xperia is never going to be their object of lust. Instead it is built for a decision that is made with the left hand side of the brain – all rationality and thoughtfulness. This is for the practical enterprise "decision by committee" brigade, who carefully count features and dollars and for them, it is a must.

In a way the Xperia, although it is a new break-away for Sony Ericsson, taking it into the world of Microsoft Mobile and going head to head with HTC, could be the wrong move at the wrong time for the company.

In a way the Xperia X1 is a new break away for Sony Ericsson, taking it into the world of Microsoft Mobile and going head to head with HTC - whose G1 has just been released in conjunction with Google and T-Mobile.

Taiwan's HTC in the past has managed to make way too much ground out of being the only vendor which does a decent job of Windows Mobiles, Windows Mobile has always struggled, but is it struggling more now than at any time in the past and this is a little like taking on your first big mortgage just as the credit crunch hits. Perhaps Sony Ericsson thinks that HTC is there for the taking in a recession or will add to the Xperia line with more enterprising offerings such as laptops and netbooks.

But for the second year in a row, Microsoft has just admitted that it had failed to hit its targets for Windows Mobile licenses selling just 18 million licenses, short of the target of 20 million in a handset market that has shifted over 1 billion devices a year, all this despite Microsoft committing around $145 million each year to R&D.

The battery is a beast - literally

But this is not about Microsoft's fortunes but Sony Ericsson's new device and the first things you notice about the Xperia X1, as your fingers fumble with the catch to take it apart, is that the battery is about twice the size of anything else we've ever seen in a phone – slim, but both wide and fat. It seem to promise solid, reliable performance, but to the astute reviewer it simply gives away a clue that all the new services on this device are burning battery, and it just HAD to be that big.

This is supposed to give it a battery life which is very hard to nail down, talk time of 10 hours using a GSM connection, more like 6.5 hours with a UMTS connection and even less if you are using it for video all the time. My own experiences with the battery were that I did not feel short changed when I was forced to re-charge it after two days fumbling around with every feature it had, but in order to manage that it has had to ship with this 1500 mAh (milliampere-hour) lithium polymer battery. Turning it on gives you a pleasant haptics buzz, like so many modern phones. Well worth having for all those times you are fiddling around in the dark trying to turn your phone on.

My own experiences with the battery were that I did not feel short changed when I was forced to re-charge it after two days fumbling around with every feature it had, but in order to manage that it has had to ship with this 1500 mAh (milliampere-hour) lithium polymer battery.

But it's then that Windows Mobile first hits you. The big green screen yells, "I am Windows Mobile". It happens to be version 6.1 and it (almost) strikes you numb with fear. Will it take half an hour to boot? Will it crash and give me the dreaded Blue Screen of Death? Will every new application leave the screen hanging while it loads slower than a New York traffic jam?

None of the above happened by the end of my journey, and I was beginning to get past the panic attacks each time it loaded. But like all Windows Mobile phones, and the reason that it is doing so badly, this phone's designers are convinced that the Windows interface on a handset is "friendly" and saves on 'learning curve' time, when the truth is that other interfaces on handsets are entirely intuitive, and have no learning curve at all, and always relying on obvious visual artifacts, not miniature Windows icons that you need a magnifying glass to see. This phone's functions are aimed at people over 50 and yet none of them have good enough eyesight to use it.

Please align the screen – use the stylus!

The first time you boot it up it asks you to align the screen, so that the touchscreen can respond to finger movements and the like smoothly and accurately – this is akin to leaving the analogue control sticks on your PlayStation upright during loading, so as not to confuse the console. Aligning the screen involves touching the touch screen where a tiny cross appears in the centre. Then, more crosses appear, in the corners, and at other various points of the display – pretty soon it turns into a portable version of Whack-a-Mole, only without the fun element.

By the way, did I mention that the crosses need to be pressed with the stylus and not a human finger? No? Well, neither did Microsoft or Sony Ericsson. After 20 frustrating minutes pressing crosses (after which the only thing cross was me) I decide to give it a go using the stylus – seconds later, like breaking the combination to a Swiss bank vault, I was in. It seems the screen touches have to be really, really accurate for the alignment process to work. Nothing like that on the iPhone is there?

Whilst that using the stylus to align the screen may seem obvious to some, it's not how most other phones are opened, and seeing as there's nothing in the manual about using this, would it really have killed Sony or Microsoft or whoever to have a message saying 'align the screen using the stylus' during start-up. After the screen has been successfully aligned, the X1 then asks you to go through a demo opening diary entries and the like – again, this HAS to be done with the stylus, but unlike the alignment screen, these stages can (thankfully) be bypassed.

Where is the 9 panel interface?

Nice opening sequence, groovy graphics and sounds etc… and then we are in the default interface. Instead of being greeted with the familiar 9 panel interface, the phone defaults you to a single Windows panel, offering Office apps, messages, tasks, appointments, and Google Search. Everything is screaming "enterprise phone" at this point, the type of tool your boss would give you – all duty and not enough fun. The Office apps include Word, PowerPoint, OneNote mobile, Excel mobile, and Windows Live Messenger. The system can also have direct push for emails using Microsoft Direct Push, which is built into Windows Mobile.

The interface to messages is a mess. I can see them but can't reply to them, as reply and delete are both grayed out on the drop down Windows menu. For some reason, if you highlight the entire content of the message, and then click on the drop menu I can do what I want. Yep, that lively Windows interface, so not right for a phone.

But Nokia and Samsung phones (to name but a few) always have an option highlighted, and quite sensibly assume that this is what you want to manipulate. When you have a phone in your hand you expect it to behave like a phone. This phone would work well for someone that has "never" had a mobile phone before, and only had a Windows PC – only by knowing that Windows works on the principle that you have to tell it what you want things done to first, before you can give it orders was I able to figure this out.

How many keyboards does it take to make a phone?

Somewhere in messing about I click on a keyboard symbol that is so tiny that it is almost invisible. It brings up a keyboard at the bottom of the screen which is so tiny that it's almost invisible. I touch it with my big clammy finger and it yells at me to use the stylus. I find myself apologizing before dutifully fishing the stylus out of its slot.

Finally fed up with this "Not messaging" menu I notice the one lovely thing about Windows, that the universal X in the top right brings an end to most things and I click it – good guess.

Thankfully, the X1 comes with a physical slide-out keyboard which is, good enough, despite the keys not coming with haptics or noise feedback to tell you when you have pressed them (Sony Ericsson has all that on the Walkman 980, so why not here?). It slides out nicely, and feels reassuringly robust, although I found out that it is quicker to tap out a message using the numeric pad when the phone is held upright.

Camera and Video

One of the nice things when you are using the camera for video is that there is lots of space to store video; the disadvantage is that it takes a while to load the camera application, so any pictures that you wanted to grab would have been missed by the time you prepared the camera. On the other hand this is true of most phones.

The zoom on the camera also didn't seem to work, until I worked out that this was because the 3.2 Megapixel camera may not have the resolution, or at least not on the default settings. But everything else you might expect was there on an average camera, light settings, white balance, auto focus, and they all worked fine. You are supposed to be able to do video calls with this phone, but since I know no-one with a phone that could receive them, I was unable to test this.

To GPS or not GPS?

No GPS software seems to have come with the phone even though it has a GPS chip and assisted GPS function, but if you want to upgrade the Xperia to use the Wayfinder GPS application you can, this costs about £40 but Google Maps for mobile is already set up and although it works, it is a bit small for the screen, and once again it is easier to use the stylus to navigate. On applications like this the optical joystick is far easier. Something called Quick GPS, can be downloaded – but this is clearly not GPS. In fact it relies on proximity to a base station to locate you, so it's not very accurate.

The X1 comes with a physical  keyboard which slides out nicely, and feels reassuringly robust, and typing isn't that bad either, despite the keys not coming with haptics or noise feedback to tell you when you have pressed them.When browsing, the internet links aren't obvious and there seems to be no button to Click to follow a link. The help menu helps set up a regular news feed as a panel and allows it to be updated throughout the day but you have to make sure you are on a flat rate internet band or this could get quite costly.

In fact I found all the usual commands back, reload, add to bookmarks, portrait mode, zoom in, zoom out, save page, text selection on find in page but no way of just clicking on a link. Perhaps it was our operator that was expecting some kind of log in. Zoom works on the browser using a double tap on the touch screen, and although this takes a bit of getting used to, it is a powerful feature.

Many of the advanced features seemed to be beyond an average installer to get working. The handset is supposed to work with Wi-Fi, and I managed to turn it on, but it rejected the local access point's WEP number and probably needed some form of prefix before it will work. Like many phones once you've found out how it will work, it will probably be robust, but a quick reconnaissance was not enough to find it.

The phone also is supposed to feature handwriting recognition so that you can make stylus scribbled notes and the system will convert them into ASCII characters, but once again it was a feature that was not easy to test, and I can't speak for it except to say that it wasn't pre-loaded and ready out of the box.

In Summary

All in all, this phone will take a while to learn how to use. Windows Mobile customers will be delighted to get a touch screen device, and even more delighted to get a device which has some of Sony Ericsson's know how in media. Most cellular operators will backfill their enterprise operations with this device, so it will have to sell in reasonable numbers. But your average iPhone user will not convert to it, it is expensive, and the Xperia range may by a rounding error for Sony Ericsson compared to its CyberShot and Walkman phones.
 

 Pros

Highly customisable touchscreen display.
Slide-out screen reveals QWERTY keyboard.

 Cons

Not exactly cheap!

Our Rating

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The Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 is a confident new entry into the smartphone market; persevere with the initial screen alignment gripes, and you'll find a capable if not exactly revolutionary enterprise phone.

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Sony Ericsson Experia X1 Review

Review by: anon6633 from , 9th April 2009

probably the peak of the mobile phone technology in the era of cellular communication! superb with maximum on everything that one can imagine about mobile cellphone.

However, we understand that the execellency is not for everyone. It is for those who understand communication and gadget technology by the technology who understands the excellent persons.

The size, the power, the computing time is amazing. Yet, the peak needs a peak in price...

I agree that there was something behind sony ericsson when they prepare this cellphone into the market, and it is not money at all...

something that transcends modern culture as shaped by technology...
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anon6633 from gave the Sony Ericsson Experia X1 a

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Sony Ericsson Experia X1 Review

Review by: anonymous8707 from , 1st March 2009

Got X1 recently, should of got a phone instead, why on earth does the screen go black when in use and the battery is useless View Full Review

anonymous8707 from gave the Sony Ericsson Experia X1 a

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Sony Ericsson Experia X1 Review

Review by: anon8903 from , 15th January 2009

the x1 is a great mobile with typing messages or touch screen.my only moan about this phone is the built in camara isnt as good as my w580i phone.other than that this phone is fantastic View Full Review

anon8903 from gave the Sony Ericsson Experia X1 a

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Sony Ericsson Experia X1 Review

Review by: anonymous558 from , 15th January 2009

The Sony Ericsson Experia X1 is almost perfect,just two things wrong battery life and no radio View Full Review

anonymous558 from gave the Sony Ericsson Experia X1 a

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Sony Ericsson Experia X1 Review

Review by: anon4727 from , 14th January 2009

The Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 is slim and easy to navigate with a QWERTY keyboard for typing messages. The phone has wireless and blue tooth, great for storing your favourite pictures and music. The phone's camera takes great pictures and the inbuilt fm radio is great for keeping up with what's new. An id tracking function gets you info on any artists and albums you hear. View Full Review

anon4727 from gave the Sony Ericsson Experia X1 a

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Sony Ericsson Experia X1 Review

Review by: anon4721 from , 14th January 2009

The camera in the Sony Ericsson Experia X1 is of a high standard for a mobile phone. The camera has auto focus and flash features for better pictures. This handset even has a video call camera so that you can see other people when you are talking to them on the phone. The Experia comes with a WAP 2 internet enabled browser, so if you like surfing then this is the phone for you. View Full Review

anon4721 from gave the Sony Ericsson Experia X1 a

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Sony Ericsson Experia X1 Review

Review by: anon1268 from , 14th January 2009

If you are looking for the type of handset that will fit neatly into your pocket then try the Sony Ericsson Experia X1. This phone is slim and light and does everything and more that you would expect from the latest mobile phones. You can listen to the news with RSS feeds and download your favourite games. If you like music on the go the phone comes with an MP3, AAC and MPEG4 files supportive player. View Full Review

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Sony Ericsson Experia X1 Review

Review by: Raj from India, 17th November 2008

X1 is a complete phone with all the features.The biggest problem is the battrey.I just got X1 and very unhappy with the battrey life.If you use the themes the battrey will just last for 6hrs stand by,i am not talking abt the talk time.I hope sony ericsson would do something about this problem View Full Review

Raj from India gave the Sony Ericsson Experia X1 a

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