My last post about Sony Ericsson’s Xperia X10  was a bit of a rant, as a friend pointed out. He’s not wrong… but I think it’s justified considering the obvious quality (or lack of) of their applications – both mobile and desktop. Anyway, I felt it was fair game to give my readers a more objective perspective on it because I’ve been asked after people have read my last few posts if I hated the Xperia – and I truly don’t, so something must have been unclear or my sentiments weren’t properly displayed. I never said I was a qualified blogger, I just thought I’d put the info out there because there’s so few of it as of this moment on the Internet. Keep in mind that I’ve switched to the Xperia last week after using an iPhone 3G for two years. There will be some heavy comparing done here. So here comes a more professional, if you will, review of the X10a.

Physical design

Image: Sony Insider

The first thing you’ll ]notice about the Xperia X10 is that it’s not as small as the iPhone. The Xperia’s size is 119 x 63 x 13 mm while Apple’s iPhone is 115.5 x 62.1 x 12.3mm. It’s available in two colours at the moment: black and white. I got the white version because I figured it would be a nice change after two years with a black iPhone. When first looking at the X10, the first thing you’ll notice is its huge 4″ TFT screen with scratch-resistant coating. It’s capable of displaying 65,636 colours (that’s an Android 1.6 limitation, not hardware) in a 480×854 pixel resolution (as opposed to iPhone’s 480x320px) which consequently is also the size you’ll want to use when creating wallpapers. As a reference point and a joyful stab at Apple, the Xperia screen is bigger than the iPhone by 0.5″. That’s not all the Xperia is better at either, it’s significantly lighter than a regular 16G iPhone too, although they both supposedly weight 135 grams. The Sony Ericsson branding on the front (silver text near the speaker and below the screen respectively saying “Sony Ericsson” and “Xperia”) and the back (same text as the front with a green/blue embossed (!) Sony Ericsson logo) is really not that bad once you stop paying attention to it. Nobody came up to me and said “Oh that’s the Xperia!” yet, so I consider that a good thing. As you would expect, it’s mostly made out of plastic. The back cover (that you need to take off to get to the battery, miniSD card and SIM card) feels really cheap once it’s off the rest of phone – I’ll have to see how long that lasts. There’s a 8.1MP camera on the back and I believe there’s also an objective on the front, though I have yet to figure out how to use it (which means it may not be a camera at all). Near what I think is or might be a camera lens on the front is a little barely noticeable LED that, as far as I know, can flash three colors: red, green and blue – more on that later. Comparing the buttons and layout with the iPhone (because it’s the most popular one at this time and also my previous model), it’s not as intelligent and user-friendly as Apple, but it’s not that far. There’s three lean rectangle buttons below the screen: Menu, Home and Back with nice little white LEDs on each side of the middle (Home) button and that’s it. Apple’s one-button design is nothing short of genius, but the folks at Sony Ericsson have provided users with a more customizable feel to it – more on the buttons and their effect later. The top of the phone sports an 3.5mm standard audio outlet, a covered firewire plug and another small button used, as the iPhone, to power on/off or lock the device in various scenarios. The cool innovation here is the camera button that’s on the right side of the phone near the bottom. Once you turn your X10a in a landscape position, that button is exactly where you’d expect it to be to perform the actions it does such as  camera shutter.

Hardware

It rocks a huge 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor that makes the phone pretty responsive and capable of running CPU-intense applications, as opposed to the 600MHz you’ll find in a 3GS. There’s 256MB of memory plus an extra 128MB reserved for graphics (the iPhone doesn’t have that last part). It also does Bluetooth obviously. Hardware wise, that’s really all I care about. It came bundled with a 16G miniSD card (I believe that’s Rogers’ doing and not Sony Ericsson since it’s reportedly bundled with a 8G miniSD normally), a cheap pair of Sony Ericsson-branded headphones and a standard charger. The cool thing about the charger though is that it’s just like Apple’s: it’s a miniUSB cable that you can use to plug in your PC or use it to plug in a power outlet using the adapter they provide. Convenient, I like it. There is however some things that are less appreciated due in part to the hardware. For one, the sound volume doesn’t go very high. It could be a limitation of Mediascape since the alarm, notifications and ringers all seem to be louder than what songs played in Mediascape appear to be. Second, well there are no accessories for it yet – no screen protectors and no cases. I realize that’s not really Sony Ericsson’s fault, but the design of the phone is rather unconventional, very rectangle-ish so nothing that’s out right now can be used with it efficiently.

Interface

Now that we have all that covered, let’s use this thing. First thing you’ll notice is the lockscreen. It really, really resembles Apple’s (clock and wallpaper are displayed when locked) except that the swiping gesture you need to perform to unlock it is actually an arc starting from the bottom of the screen to the middle right part of it. Nice little clin d’oeil there. Once you get used to it it’s really not a problem as you can imagine. The interface also reminds me of iPhones, but it’s better in almost every way. I really hate that I haven’t figured out how to take screenshots with it because it would make explaining this to you so much simpler… anyway. We all know what an iPhone screen looks like, right? Well keep that in mind, I’ll use that to illustrate what’s where and what does what. First, the app icons. Very similar, same concept. The Xperia however only has three pages of apps – you cannot have more with this crippled version. There are third-party applications such as Helix that will allow you to hack around that and basically create a new “homescreen application”, but that’s probably too advanced for most casual users so I won’t cover it today. The homescreen manipulations are very similar to Apple’s – tap to run an app, long tap to reorder it. Three major differences though; first you can add widgets to any of your pages. Widgets can be anything application-provided like Seesmic’s Twitter ticker to the default widgets like the analog or digital clocks. One caveat regarding that though – there’s lots of cool widgets and you can only usually add one per page since you run out of space and Android won’t let you add any more. Icons plus widgets take a lot of room, it’s a shame that there can’t be more pages. Second, the statusbar is simply amazing. There’s a big gap on the left side in which notifications appear. Notifications can be your new emails, new tweets, the song that’s playing in Mediascape (for quick access to the player) or really anything that you would think of using the iPhone’s push notifications for but implemented in a much usable way than Apple’s. See, if you tap the statusbar than drag down, you’ll pull a new window that contains all your notification – IN TEXT! – without having to open the application. How amazing and convenient is that?? And that’s not the coolest part. On every notification, there’s a LED on the front of the phone, kind of like the BlackBerry’s annoying orange/red indicator but much smoother, that can flash in red (low battery), blue and green, as defined by the application sending the notification. A-ma-zing. My emails flash green and my new Twitter mentions flash blue. I can know why my phone beeps without so much as touching it. Beat that, Apple. The same concept applies for the bottom. There is no static dock on the Xperia, but you can access your menu (where all your applications reside since you can’t possible have enough of 3 pages to put all your icons and restricting the number of applications you can have would be a suicide for the Android platform) the same way, by tapping the bottom and dragging up, pulling the application menu along the way. Very cool. For more information and a video of the interface in action, check out Gizmodo – but make sure you don’t forget anything there.

The one thing that annoys me about all that interface though are the applications themselves. I’m coming from an iPhone background, I’m not used to have shit running all the time and I get paranoid about my battery usage (which with the Xperia easily lasts me for a whole day – no matter what I do or don’t do). It’s obvious that for their notification system applications need to run in the background and there are a lot of “task managers” available on the Android Market… but it’s still kind of annoying. Unneeded things like Mediascape and Timescape can be running at any given time for no apparent reason, same for camera and other apps that really don’t belong in the background process list.

All in all, do I think the Xperia X10 is better than an iPhone? It’s hard to answer. When compared side to side, there are pros and cons to each device and the manufacturer behind it. Apple had two years to perfect its design, strengthen its userbase and plant a standard usage inside everyone’s head. It will definitely be interesting to see where those new Android devices lead us. So do I think the Xperia is better than an iPhone? It’s too early to tell, but what I really love about it is that it’s an equally viable alternative to something that was beginning to reek of  oppression and restriction. For that, we should all be thankful.