REVIEWS: Sony Ericsson X10 mini pro

Fancy a mini QWERTY Android slider?

Hot on the heels of the Sony Ericsson X10 mini, is the pro version of the same handset. The differentiation comes in with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Sony Ericsson told us that they did see it appealing to a slightly different user from the touchscreen-only X10 mini, although with strengthened text entry, the X10 mini pro could appeal to anyone who writes a lot of messages.

If you haven't read our review of the Sony Ericsson X10 mini, it is worth taking a look at that model too, although we'll cover most of the same ground here: the OS has the same neat tweaks to make the small screen space more functional and the design is pretty much the same. To save you the time of having to read the entire review if you are only interested in the keyboard, we'll tackle that part first.

The keyboard slides out with a distinct action. We've liked the typing experience on some of Sony Ericsson's recent handsets, like the Vivaz pro, and we get some of the same experience here. However, given the size of the phone overall, the keyboard is a little on the small side too.

This means that there has been some compromise made to get all the controls you might want. The keyboard is arranged across a 4 x 10 key grid, with the bottom row containing the space bar, which we found to be of a reasonable size. The quality of construction is good, with the firm base providing a stable platform and offering up nice precise key presses.

Just over half of the keys have alternative characters on them, accessed by pressing the blue button. This gives you access to numerals and major punctuation, the remainder of alternative characters accessed through a Sym key. It would have been nice to see press and hold access caps, but instead you have to use the shift key.

One of the obvious compromises has been the omission of full cursor keys and any menu keys. There is only a left and right cursor, with up and down being left off, so you won't be scrolling up and down pages or menus without touching the screen. The left and right cursors, however, do make it easy to correct text you've entered by simply pressing the line and moving to the correct place, rather than having to press in the exact you need, which can be fiddly.

It would have been nice to see a menu key, but as it is, you'll have to use the array of buttons across the screen to open up menus, etc, when the keyboard is out.

Despite the keyboard's diminutive size, it does offer a fairly fast text entry mode. The user interface customisations made by Sony Ericsson to cater for the X10 mini pro's small display do acknowledge the fact you are using the keyboard, so appears differently from the on-screen keyboard text entry page. That means you have more space to see what you are writing, you can fill in webforms in the page and so on.

The on-screen T9 keyboard is also available when you don't have the keyboard deployed, useful for when you need to reply to messages whilst hanging onto a train handrail or whatever.

The UI could be a little better for sending out text messages. The interface offers the now common stream of messages coming in from opposite sides of the screen. They are finished in a rather square fashion so appear to take up more space than they need. The conversation is also topped by the name of the person you are talking too, which could have been squeezed into the message boxes, but this is a minor point: with a screen of only 2.2 inches, there are always going to be space issues.

Another persistent irritation we had was the language bar that appears when you start typing text into fields in messages and some apps too. We've seen this on a number of devices recently, but we've yet to feel the need to change to Basque when writing messages, at least not so prominently on the screen - perhaps this would be better as an option accessed under the menu button.

We also found that there were no spelling or correction options available for the physical keyboard, so if you make a mistake, you have to go back and correct it before you send.

Most important pages will rotate to match the landscape aspect you'll be using the keyboard in, but not all do. Given the variety of Android applications out there, you're never going to get a 100 per cent success rate, but text entry, the browser - basically the core functions - and the main menus all do.

So heading back to the device itself, it measures 90 x 52 x 17mm and weighs 120g, the keyboard mechanism adding to the thickness and the weight. There is another change under the cover, which is a changeable battery, the extra size making this possible where it wasn't in the X10 mini.

The screen is compact at 2.55 inches and 240 x 320 pixel, so it is both small and low in resolution. This obviously restricts what the phone is going to be suitable for: it is never going to excel at browsing the Internet, although mobile-specific websites work nicely enough, and it isn't going to be an especially good media handset either.

The topside design isn't as smooth as the X10 mini and we immediately noticed the hard top edge against the ear when making calls, which didn't seem to be of the highest quality. It is a capacitive touchscreen however, and despite its size, it copes well enough thanks to some clever customisation that Sony Ericsson has laid over the top of the Android v1.6 operating system which runs the phone.

The user interface offers up a shortcut icon in each corner of the screen (which you can change as you wish) by default offering messages, music, dialler and contacts. You can add widgets, which then lets you swipe left and right to move between home pages and view these widgets. You can't add application or browser shortcuts to the homepages, but you do get to use other Android widgets as you download them from the Android Market.

The menu slides-up from the bottom of the screen, presenting a 9-icon grid. Again, you can swipe left and right between pages to access all your applications. The headline Sony Ericsson app that comes pre-installed is Timescape, which will pull your Facebook and Twitter feeds into one tile-based timeline, although we feel it doesn't really offer you much and seems to duplicate what you'll end up using most of the time anyway - your regular Twitter and Facebook Android apps.

We like the music player, although it would be nice to have some music control from the standby window. You can alter the volume of the music when the screen is off using the volume rocker on the right-hand side, which is always a useful feature. The external speaker does a pretty good job too and there is an FM radio.

The bundled headphones are better than average and fit into the 3.5mm jack, meaning you could use existing headphones too. The slot is key shaped, and Sony Ericsson tells us there will be accessories for the X10 mini, for example an external speaker. A 2GB microSD card is bundled in"the"box to store your music.

Sony Ericsson confirmed to us that there was a plan in place to upgrade to v2.1 of Android this year, however we've seen that this isn't always a smooth process for all customers (as Orange HTC Hero owners will tell you); for the time being you'll be left with Android v1.6. You'll still have access to the Android Market and the growing range of apps on there, although you need to consider that not all apps will work on this device because of the screen resolution.

One criticism we have of Sony Ericsson's interface is not sticking to using the menu button for options within its applications. Instead you have to head back to Settings and then change the options before returning to your application, whilst the rest of the Android world offers these sorts of changes up-front. If something isn't behaving exactly as you'd like, this means you have to fiddle around a bit to get it going. It can also drag its heels a little in opening applications from time to time, so it lacks the punch that more powerful handsets offer you.

Around the back of the X10 mini pro is the 5-megapixel camera. This offers cut-down features compared to many camera phones (the iPhone 4 excepted, which has no options). Essentially you can choose between auto, macro, twilight and sports. You can also easily enable or disable the LED "flash", although this isn't especially effective as is often the case with this type of flash.

The camera performance is the same as the X10 mini, providing average results given good light, but suffering as the light gets low. The same applies to video (an X10 mini sample is here), although the maximum resolution in this case is 640 x 480, captured at around 30fps. There is a low "mms" resolution if you prefer, although with many handsets moving over to offer HD or 16:9 video capture, the offering here is decidedly average.

In terms of connectivity the X10 mini pro packs in everything you'd expect; you get HSDPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS. The GPS means you get Google Maps with Navigation, bonus for those who need to navigate on the fly, even if the system is a little crude. So despite the X10 mini pro's diminutive features, you get the hardware you'll find elsewhere.

Of course the limitation of the size of this phone comes into play when you venture into the browser. There is no multi-touch for zooming and moving around web pages can be something of a chore. The browser will give you multiple pages and so on, but will never be as complete an experience as you'll get from a device with an extra inch on the diagonal.

Like the X10 mini, the size does restrict the phone somewhat and limits the experience. We can't fault it on providing a full range of functionality on a device you'll easily slip into any pocket, and that may appeal to some. But if you are looking to enjoy the wide range of multimedia opportunities that modern smartphones offer then you might want to look elsewhere.

Running on the Android platform does mean it is customisable, so you can take advantage of all those apps to squeeze more out of the device. We've seen a number of novelty devices over the past few years, but the choice of platform elevates the X10 mini pro above this; you still have the power to perform many connected tasks with ease, and with the advantage of the choice that Android offers you.

The battery life is short, sitting somewhere between 3.5 and 4 hours of talk time. We found that we were charging the X10 mini pro every night whilst we were using it.?

Verdict:

As we said with the X10 mini, Sony Ericsson has done a good job of making a potentially novelty phone into something that is cute and capable of meeting many of the modern demands of a phone. We still feel that Timescape doesn't really meet its aims and we'd like to see it revised and improved, and the raw data made available in a straight feed, which would mean you didn't need a separate Twitter app.

We can't really fault the build quality of the X10 mini pro either and we've found the keyboard to be a pleasure to use, if a little fiddly with caps and having used both the X10 mini and the X10 mini pro, we can't help liking the quirky little phone.

What the Sony Ericsson X10 mini pro doesn't do is offer you a solution that you'll happily spend a lot of time working your emails from. The screen is just too small when you get into reading through them.

Like the X10 mini, the pro doesn't really excel in any one area. It won't suit everyone and it won't meet the needs of those who are after a great media handset. But for those who want flexibility but are mostly about sending messages, the combination of the keyboard and Android might appeal.

And then of course, it's difficult to dislike its dinky features, and if size is the overall winner, the X10 mini might be the better phone for you.

Related links:

• Sony Ericsson X10 mini - Read the review

Tags:PhonesMobile phonesSony EricssonSony Ericsson X10 mini proAndroid

???????????

Sony Ericsson X10 mini pro originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Mon, 05 Jul 2010 19:16:51 +0100

View the original article here

REVIEWS: Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini

Size doesn't matter

If you've watched any of the football from the FIFA World Cup 2010 - and we're hesitant to say football - you will have probably seen the advertising for the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini. The Xperia X10 mini (E10i) is an unusual device. It is the smallest Android handset we've seen and we can't imagine that you'll see a touchscreen phone much smaller without making serious compromises when it comes to usability and features.

Why is it called the X10 mini? Well that's a question we've been asking ourselves. It picks up the same design as the Xperia X10 and offers some of the same features, but critically, the X10 mini is aimed at a different user, it has different aims and ambitions. The Xperia X10 wants to be the expansive flagship multimedia handset offering the complete experience and challenging the likes of the HTC Desire and Samsung Galaxy S; the Xperia X10 mini is compact, affordable, perhaps even cute.

As such, drawing a link through nomenclature probably isn't necessary, especially now we have the X8 announced: the X10 mini would perhaps be better called the X4. We were critical of the X10 in a number of areas, but as the X10 mini has a different remit, we're less concerned about some of those things, so it isn't necessarily a foregone conclusion.

Our review X10 mini came with choice of six different coloured backs in the box: black, pink, yellow, red, silver and white pearlescent. These easily clip on and off and although they are plastic, they look smart enough and add a bit of fun to the phone, letting you tailor it to your mood, outfit, or whatever.

One thing that becomes immediately obvious about the design of the X10 mini is the curves. The rear sides curve so it sits in the palm of your hand comfortably, and the top and bottom of the front curve off too. This is important on a device this small as your fingers travel around these areas more as you interact with the small screen.

It measures just 83 x 50 x 16mm, centred around a 2.55-inch screen. Three buttons range across the bottom of the screen offering menu, home and back controls. Around the sides you'll find a camera button and volume rocker and on the top is the standby/lock key.

Physical connections offer up a Micro-USB for charging, along with a plastic flap that we doubt would stand up to any amount of rigorous use, and a 3.5mm headphone jack which is part of a key-shaped connection, we assume for some sort of accessory. Around the back of the phone you'll find a 5-megapixel camera with an LED "flash" along with the external speaker.

Power the X10 mini on and you are greeted with Android v1.6 sitting under Sony Ericsson's custom skin and as such you don't see much of Android on the surface. There are some similarities to the X10 but not many, mostly because the size of the X10 mini dictates an arrangement to make it useable. We actually quite like the solution, so hats off to Sony Ericsson for making this work.

The homescreens have an icon sitting in each corner which gives you access to core functions: SMS messages, dialler, contacts and music (by default). There is something of a missed opportunity here as a combined inbox accessed through the messages corner would have been an obvious benefit.

The homescreens offer a side-swiping arrangement, letting you drop widgets onto these pages and adding pages accordingly. There are a limited number of widgets from Sony Ericsson, but you can drop any Android widgets that you acquire when downloading apps from the Android Market, although the size will render some of them less useful.

Unfortunately you can't drop links to applications or bookmarks on the homescreens, which seems an odd omission, but you can change any of the corner icons to those applications you want, so you could ditch the messages icon and just rely on the pull-down bar at the top of the screen for your message alerts, for example. Bookmarks can be added to the main menu from the browser from where they could also be assigned to those corner shortcuts if you wanted - a link to m.pocket-lint.com perhaps?

Press the menu button, or swipe up, and the menu appears. This is a grid of icons with 9 on each page so you can swipe left and right through the menus which expand as you add applications.

Like other custom skins we've seen on Android, Sony Ericsson invites you to sign-in to your online accounts to feed information into your phone. Their Timescape application will ask you to log-in to your Facebook and Twitter accounts and then provides a stream of updates presented as individual panels on the screen.

We criticised the application on the X10 for not going far enough and being a little limiting considering the size of the screen and the amount of information you could see. On the X10 mini that is less of a problem. You can only really see one panel at a time, but the screen doesn't really allow for much more. You can then scroll up and down these updates.

As before, however, images are picked up from the online source and used as the background for the updates, but are strictly low resolution with the text over the top. It's a nice idea, but doesn't really look as good as it should. A high-resolution image but with a bleed to stop it obscuring the text might have looked better.

As before you can filter your selection to only show Twitter or Facebook (or messages or missed calls), although this was done by a side-swipe before, here it is the case of manually selecting what you want to see. If you follow a large number of Twitter users then you'll never keep up with things, and leafing through individual updates, rather than seeing them in a list with several on the page makes things more time consuming. We also think that as Sony Ericsson is gathering this information, they should provide a straightforward list view as well, but as they don't you'll need to install a separate Twitter client to gather the data again and to handle images, which Timescape doesn't cater for.

It is fortunate then that the X10 mini is an Android device as it is easy to find new applications to expand the phone and customise it to your needs, although beware the limitations of v1.6 of Android and the small screen size, as not everything will be available to you. We'd rather have an Android device than something like Brew OS, because there is definite advantage in being part of a larger community.

You can connect up friends with your contacts, which then makes the experience more complete, as you can jump from you contact's details through to see interactions in Timescape, which is a novel spin on the normal linked lists. It would be much less fiddly however, if the phone offered to automatically suggest matches.

The music player works well enough, although there are no controls from the locked screen, but you are only one button press away from unlocking the screen so it's no major issue. You can also change the volume whilst in standby which is something we always like. There is an FM radio too, as well as Sony Ericsson's PlayNow service which will offer to flog you tracks - amongst other things - at a somewhat inflated price.

The camera on the back offers average phone camera performance. It struggles to get a grip on details or colours, tending to wash out when in bright conditions, but coping better with closer range subjects. The on-screen controls offer a few scenes, but we like the fact you can easily enable and disable the LED flash. It's a shame the flash is so low powered to be virtually ineffective, combined with the phone's need to drop the shutter speed so indoor or low light shots are typically blurry.

The video offers a fairly average 640 x 480, although you do get capture at 30fps, so it could be worse. But ignoring all that, this is probably the smallest camera you'll find around. It won't win any imaging awards, but we're pleased to see the basics covered here. You also get sharing options, with email, MMS, Facebook and Picasa offered out of the box.

The browser experience is limited by the screen size here and there is no multi-touch on offer. We found that text often rescrolled accurately to fit the screen to make reading possible, but you'll need to constantly scroll up and down. If you plan on spending a lot of time on websites you might want a device with a larger screen.?

With the Xperia X10 mini being so small there is no space for a QWERTY keyboard on-screen. The X10 mini pro will deal with this by adding a slide-out keyboard, but here you have to use the on-screen 12-key keyboard. You get the option of multi-press or T9 predictive entry.

There is an obvious limitation with the screen size, because you only get a tiny window to preview what you are writing. As a result, you'll find yourself using a selection of drop-down menus when entering predictive text, but on the whole, Sony Ericsson have made it possible to enter text without too much of a problem. You don't expect much, but given that the size slows you down over the furious fingering you'd give something like the HTC Legend, we found it to be surprisingly capable.

Of course, if you are going to be spending a lot of time sending longer emails, then you might struggle to keep track of things with such a small screen (both in terms of reading and writing). But if you are more interested in sending out shorter SMS messages, then you should cope well enough.

One thing we did notice was that your thumb can get rather cramped because of tight arrangement of everything - keyboard and buttons. If you have large hands, this isn't going to work so well for you. It's worth testing it in-store if you are interested to see if it is going to be comfortable for you to use.

The screen is a 2.55-inch 240 x 320 pixel resolution capacitive display. This is a low resolution, so don't expect the sort of experience you get from larger media-rich devices. As such it is no surprise to find that Sony Ericsson's Mediascape application found in the Xperia X10 isn't included here. You'll still get a photo browser and video browser, but if watching video is a prime concern, then you'll be better off with a larger device.

As an affordable device you don't lose out on major connectivity options. You get HDSPA and Wi-Fi, offering fast connections to your data, although we did at times think the connection wasn't as strong as rival devices: we found it couldn't detect our Wi-Fi network when other devices did, and the X10 mini often seemed to find itself without a data connection, although this might be network dependent amongst other factors.

You also get sensors, like the proximity sensor and a motion sensor to rotate the screen content where it can - not everything will rotate. You get GPS too and we were pleased to find Google Maps Navigation present and correct, even if that service is a little perfunctory for UK users. It does mean free navigation though, which is more to the point.

Call quality, as it often is from smaller devices, isn't the best. Callers sounded a little too distant and reported that we didn't sound great either.

You are then left with battery life, which we found to be poor. You'll only get 3 and a half hours of talk time and we found that the phone would quite happily drain itself of battery over night. You can turn off all the synchronisation and services, but you have to be prepared to be able to charge it every night and perhaps during the day too. The battery is built-in, so there is no chance of carrying a spare either, so you might want to consider an external battery if you are taking this out for any time and make sure it is fully charged before you head off for a night out.

Verdict:

The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini is something of a surprise package. It is a tiny phone, but offering the Android operating system brings with it the convenience of a handset that can be easily customised. You don't get short-changed on the hardware front either: you still have your essential hardware covered.?The skin that Sony Ericsson has layered over the top of Android makes it simple to use and we didn't feel that there was any real problem getting a response from the screen.

But this is a mini phone and it won't recreate the experience that large devices offer. Dealing with large amounts of text entry, or viewing full webpages requires a fair amount of effort on your part.?The battery life is a problem and the call quality wasn't the greatest either.

Overall, the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini will appeal to some, but we don't think it will be the typical Android user. As you can get this phone for free on low cost contracts, it is likely to appeal to younger users and we feel that Android makes it much more versatile than other low cost feature phones. However, you have to really want a mini phone, with low cost Android options starting to appear more frequently given you more variety in this area.

Tags:PhonesMobile phonesSony EricssonSony Ericsson Xperia X10 miniAndroid

????????????????????

Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Mon, 21 Jun 2010 12:44:04 +0100

View the original article here