Sony Ericsson’s first two Xperia phones have been a rag-bag of a few genius features and a couple of not-so-impressive ones. But all that should change with the X10. Sony Ericsson’s first Android effort might just end up being one among the hottest phones of 2010. Like the rest of the current generation of do-it-all phones, the X10 promises to cater to your entertainment and communication needs simultaneously, using Android to customise the experience.
Three of Sony Ericsson’s own apps Timescape, Mediascape and Face Recognition come built in with the phone. Timescape shows all correspondence from each contact - email, calls, texts, Facebook and Twitter updates - all collated in one place for your convenience. Click on a contact and it’ll show you all communication you’ve had with that particular person. You can also filter it by communication type, to be able to read only emails or texts for example.

Mediascape helps keep all your media in one place. Apart from displaying your stored music, video and photos, Mediascape will recommend other music and movies online that you might like. For instance, listen to a song by an artist, and you’ll be given links to interviews with them on YouTube via Mediascape. Finally, Face Recognition lets you click on a tagged photo of someone in order to view all the tagged pictures of that person. You can also call your contacts by tapping on their photographs on your screen. Up to five people can be identified in each photo. These aren’t new ideas, but the overall package seemed more intuitive and slicker than, say Palm’s Synergy or HTC’s ‘people-centric’ address book.

Available in black or white, the handset has a four-inch touchscreen with WVGA (480×854) and a scratch-resistant TFT touchscreen which displays 65,536 colours. It’s powered by a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chip and there’s a microSD slot for your media – an 8GB card will be included in the box.

On the back panel is an 8.1 MP camera, with LED flash, autofocus, face recognition, smile detection, a 16x digital zoom and geo-tagging to show where you took your pics.
The X10 runs Donut (Android 1.6) when it launches in early 2010. Sony Ericsson says Eclair (Android 2.0) doesn’t support the screen’s aspect ratio, but upgrading will be a piece of cake once it does.
Sony Ericsson has promised a slew of Android phones for 2010. Combining it’s impressive hardware expertise with Google’s OS seems like a win-win scenario for Sony Ericsson.

Specifications

Connectivity: 7.2Mbps HSDPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB, 3.5mm audio

Screen: 4-inches, 480×854 pixels

Storage: 1GB plus microSD (8GB card bundled)

Battery: Not quoted

Camera: 8.1-megapixel, 16x digital zoom, autofocus

Size/weight: 119×63x13mm/135g