Monthly Archives: April 2010

Available from Clove for £457.08

It’s time to look at some of the separate features of the Xperia X10 and see how each performs in the real world. My first impressions were extremely good, then I had a wobble, and then things came around to the positive again. Let’s see why-

Screen

The fact that the X10 screen is TFT is off-putting at first when you consider the premium price point it sells at. With capacitive technology and AMOLED getting all of the attention, you would expect to see one of them employed here, but the result of using TFT in the X10 is surprisingly positive.

The X10 works quite well outdoors in bright sunshine. I tested it on one of those rare UK days when the sun was shining fiercely and the result was a screen that I could use ‘all’ of the time. There is a difference in feel to the Desire when using touch, but not to the extent that I would put that as preferable to screen view ability in all conditions. What is the point of owning a large screened device that you can only use in some conditions? Give me a TFT that works 24 hours a day over an AMOLED any day!

I have to say that the quality of images, colours (with slight saturation) and video on the X10 indoors is extremely good and in my view not that far off from AMOLED so the trade off is a good one here.

Performance

No issues here, but it is not the fastest. It is very slightly slower than the HTC Desire, but you would only notice this if you took the time to sit the two side by side and spent a long time comparing different processes and applications. However, YouTube and videos seem to open up quicker and it appears that the more resource hungry processes are faster whereas general switching and opening and closing is a tad slower. Compared against any other phone besides the Desire and Nexus One it is right up there at the top of the pile and will be viewed as a powerhouse in terms of speed by all but the 0.02% who worry about these things.

Data Input / Buttons

This is a difficult area to enjoy these days for someone like me who has ‘issues’ with touch screen keyboards. The default setup on the X10 is what I would describe as average for data entry. The space bar in portrait is quite small (two key widths) and unnecessarily so in my opinion and the alt key can be difficult to find. As with all of these things practice does help, but the word completion feature seemed to be slightly off at times when compared to other systems. I wouldn’t rate the X10 keyboard as vastly different to the other high-end Android smartphones, but a couple of software tweaks would be welcomed. One would be to have landscape data input- I have no idea why this is not included??? CORRECTION: a battery pull gave me landscape data input so this appears to be OK.

The buttons below the screen comprise of only three; back, menu and home. They work well enough, but again are not the easiest to hit when you are in a rush. They also look slightly out of place on what is otherwise a very smart looking device and the icons on them are not obvious what they are for when you first start using it.

Call Quality / Signal

Call quality is very good to the ear, but the maximum volume is a little low when used in noisy locations. The sound is deep and shows that this phone is made by a company that makes mobiles for a living. I have said it many times, but call quality is often way down the list of priorities for manufacturers and it is pleasing to at least see some effort being made in the X10. The speakerphone, however, is very tinny and sounds like many other smartphones. Neither the volume nor sound quality are adequate for using in a car for example.

Signal strength also rarely gets a mention, but is important to reduce battery load, improve call quality and can potentially mean the difference between a good data experience and an intermittent one. So far the X10 has proved to be on a par with my Bold 9700 and is able to hold onto a 3G signal in my house which the iPhone 3GS can rarely do (using the same SIM card by the way). I have almost constant 3G service which is unheard of for me outside of Nokia and RIM handsets where I live.

Battery

Always a difficult one to judge when you only have a unit for a few days, but the 1,500mAh rating is promising. It works well provided you turn off the multitude of automatic social networking updates that are available because you can run out pretty fast if everything is turned on. It will last a day for sure, but long periods of calling and overuse of Wi-Fi has quite a dramatic effect so some management will be needed to get the most out of it. It is still on a par with other high-end Android handsets and it is a shame that none of them can power the phones for more than a day without some compromises on usage.

Tomorrow I will move on to the camera and other hardware features. The software side is immense, in a good and bad way, and that needs a lot of words as well. By the end of the week I should have a good idea of just how good this phone really is.