Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini Preview

Interface and Functionality:

You probably remember that Sony Ericsson has created a personalized Android interface, called UX, which we examined in our preview of the Xperia X10. Well, it is also used in the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini, but has been changed in order to be easy to use on the 2.55-inch screen.

The idea of the UX interface is to deliver better user experience by tweaking Android’s appearance and adding integration with social and other online services through the Timescape and Mediascape applications. Mediascape is missing on the X10 mini, but Timescape is still here, although with somewhat limited functionality. What it does is to show you an aggregated view of the latest Facebook and Twitter updates, along with your messages and missed calls (its most frequent automatic refresh period is 15 minutes). You can, of course, filter the content so that you see only tweets, for example.

Because of the small display, each page of the home screen can have only one widget. That’s not such a pain actually, because there are 5 widgets in total. And why would you need more of these anyway? Timescape is available as a widget, so the latest social correspondence is just a tap away. In addition, you have four shortcuts to apps in the four corners of the home screen, which can be customized.



From Timescape, you can link online profiles to your contacts, which will then allow you to see status updates in the phonebook – a feature we are beginning to see more and more frequently.




The camera interface is nicely personalized, but it sports almost no options, although the camera is 5MP. You can toggle the flash on and off, choose from different shooting modes, jump to the gallery … and that’s about it. Video can be recorded in 640x480 pixels resolution at 30 frames per second, so it is smooth enough. We’ll not draw a conclusion here about the quality of the samples we took, we’ll just say there’s potential in the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini’s camera.







Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini sample video at 640x480 pixels resolution.

The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini has a loudspeaker that manages to produce some very decent sound. One of the really, really better ones we have heard. It is not very loud, but the sound is deeper than what the typical phone loudspeaker produces, with no sharp and crackling noises, so we are totally in for it.


As the rest of the Xperia X10 mini’s software, the browser works very smooth. Of course, the low QVGA resolution and the small display are not the perfect tools for surfing the web, but at least loading pages, scrolling and zooming gets done real quick. You can rely on both 3G (HSDPA 7.2 Mbit/s) and Wi-Fi 802.11b/g. Unfortunately, at least on our prototype, there is no double tap zooming in the browser and no one-touch zooming as in the gallery (similar to the one in Samsung’s newer TouchWiz handsets, but better), so you’ll have to use the zoom buttons and the page overview option, which works fine.




Expectations:

You may have felt it already that the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini left us with some very positive impressions. It is cute, fast and functional. Speaking of functionality, you may want to know that due to the QVGA resolution, there are fewer apps for the X10 mini in Android Market, when compared to HVGA devices for example, but we are happy to see that the catalog has grown significantly since we reviewed the HTC Tattoo. Moreover, the X10 mini supports OpenGL ES 1.1 content (unlike the Tattoo), so we believe it will get more than decent app support.

The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini and mini pro are expected in the second quarter of the year, at a still unannounced price. This brings us to the question that if these babies get priced correctly (and Sony Ericsson doesn’t screw up in some way), we will have no other choice but declare them one of the coolest Androids out there.


Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini Video Preview: