Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 review

It seems like an awfully long time since Sony Ericsson announced its do-it-all QWERTY keyboard-packing, touch screen answer to the Jesus phone (back in February, which feels like a lifetime in mobile phone years) but has it been worth the wait?

It's a decent looker, in matt black with a silver strip around the sides. It hasn't fallen victim to the recent slimline fashion though; it's a chunky beast at 17mm thick and 145g (though not quite as chunky as HTC's rival Touch Pro).

Around the sides are USB power and sync slot, camera shutter and volume buttons, power button and (hurrah!) 3.5mm headphone socket while on the front there's a complicated looking array of buttons arranged in two stylised 'X's surrounding a touch-sensitive D-pad beneath the 65k-colour touch screen.

The slide opens with a reassuring snap; easy to do, but stiff enough to ensure it's not prone to opening in your pocket. Unusually, the screen angles upwards when you slide out the QWERTY keyboard beneath. It's a nice effect, though it's not clear what practical advantage this has other than Sony Ericsson's claim that it 'redefines premiumness'.

The keyboard itself features a rather lovely brushed chrome effect with well-spaced, subtly angled buttons that are easy for thumbs to find their way around. There are four lines of keys, with an integrated numeric keypad and while there's no room for navigation keys, we found using the 'optical 'scroll' function on the D-pad (works like a mouse button on a laptop) did the trick in this regard.

Unlike say, the iPhone or Samsung's Omnia, this isn't really designed as a one-handed device, and you will end up using the supplied stylus when you're negotiating the occasionally fiddly Windows menus.

Virtually every new Windows Mobile device finds a way to disguise the fact with a top level interface that reflects the manufacturer's brand and hopefully offers an innovative navigation option. Sony Ericsson's is the 'Panels'. This is a series of home pages which will highlight whatever function you choose, be it your contacts, media player, FM radio, time and date, Google etc etc. The device comes with seven, but you can download a few more from the Sony Ericsson website, with others expected to be added soon.

So far so good, but navigation doesn't seem to have been fully thought through. The soft keys don't function in every application (surely there's always something that can be found for them to do) and Sony Ericssson's normally reliable back button is missing, so we found ourselves reverting to the panels to find our way around, which didn't seem to be a terribly efficient method.

Browsing the internet however is a breeze. Internet Explorer is there as an option, but like most Windows Mobile 6.1 handsets, the speedier Opera is also available. You can zoom in or out using the volume buttons, and brush your finger across the screen to view web pages. You can set up RSS feeds too.

The camera is only a 3.2 megapixel model, but still offers a maximum 2048x1526 resolution and a decent range of pre-shot options. Sony Ericsson's great BestPic multishot feature is absent but there is a feature which allows you to touch part of the screen viewfinder to set the focus on a particular point. There's an LED photo light rather than Xenon flash and while this clearly isn't a photo-centric handset, the pics are still good enough to embarrass iPhone users.

The music player is derived from Sony Ericsson's Walkman range and as you might expect is pretty good, if lacking some of the bells and whistles of the Walkman range (like a graphic equaliser). The basics are well covered though, including album art, and it will allow you to play music while you perform other tasks. It will play podcasts accessed via Sony Ericsson's website and there's an FM radio with RDS and six presets.

There's GPS on board, supported by Google Maps as well as Wayfinder Navigator voice guidance SatNav on the accompanying CD.

There's 400MB of memory onboard which you can augment with microSD memory card. The inclusion of microSD is welcome, but it's not clear yet if this is likely to become standard on other SE phones, or if it will only apply to the company's Windows Mobile handsets. It will handle anything up to a 16GB card, though none is supplied.

Battery-wise you'll need to be careful with the apps. Leaving Wi-Fi and HSDPA on while we did a bit of web surfing and calling barely got us through the day. Fortunately there's a full range of power management options to help you eke out the juice.

The Xperia X1 is a great little smart phone in many ways, but it also suffers from the jack-of-all-trades syndrome, in which it can do lots of good stuff, but not quite as well as other phones. Navigation proved to be a recurring issue too as we consistently got frustrated with the time it took to find our way around. These caveats aside, it's a great all-round communicator and browser that also passes muster as an entertainment device.