Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 review: first look

Traditionally, Sony Ericsson has been somewhat of a fan of using Windows Mobile in its smartphone range. But this approach has yielded little commercial success, so how will Android fare in the Swedish manufacturer's lineup? We take a first look review at the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 to find out.

On paper, the specs look much better than on any of Sony Ericsson's previous smartphones:

• Android 1.6 operating system
• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, tri-band UMTS with HSPA
• 63mmx13mmx119mm (WDH), 135g
• 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor
• 4in WVGA (480x854 pixels) capacitive touch screen, 65,536 colors
• 1500 mAh battery
• 8.1 megapixel camera with an LED flash, auto-focus, image stabilisation, video stabilisation, facial recognition, smile detection, digital zoom and geo-tagging support
• 1GB of internal memory, microSDHC support up to 16GB
• Wi-Fi (802.11b/g), Bluetooth 2.1, A-GPS

The hardware is all there, no question, and the 4in touchscreen is a bright and responsive portal into the brimming feature set within. We do wish that Sony Ericsson had gone with a 16 million-color panel, as is the current standard amongst high end smartphones, but 65,536 colours still manage to look crisp and clear on this sizable panel. Images are crystal clear as well, and the Xperia X10 is a joy to use as a portable video player.

Sony Ericsson is known for very solid optics and great image capture quality, but alas we weren't able to take the Xperia X10 out to play with the camera to test this out at this stage.