The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 is the perfect Android media phone. That might sound like a bold claim, but delve into the Xperia X10’s specifications and you’ll discover pro-photography skills cuddling up to cool music features, video grabbing goodies and video streaming smarts. Dive in to discover how the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 will make you a master of all the media you consume and create.
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Pro photography skills
The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 comes packing an 8.1MP camera, good enough to banish your current compact camera to the back of the cupboard. Besides the enviable megapixel count, the Xperia X10 adds a great range of settings to Android which will help you get the best from the scene your shooting, including night portraits and a sports mode for catching fast moving action. There are even modes dedicated to the glare of the beach and snowy mountains, putting the X10 in a different league to typical Android snappers.
If you’re plagued with shaky hands, the Xperia X10 also has built-in image stabilisation. Switch it on and your snaps will go from blurry to brilliant. Smile detection means the Xperia X10 can grab a shot when your subjects are looking their most gleeful, and cleverly features a setting to adjust just how big their grins need to be before they’re automatically papped.
The Xperia X10 also has a self-timer for grabbing self-portraits and Facebook profile pics, rare amongst Android phones, while face detection identifies faces in your photos. Tag them and the Xperia X10 will gather snaps of the same person together.
Next-gen music player
Sony Ericsson’s Mediascape function makes the Xperia X10 an Android phone with music at its heart. Use the Xperia X10’s 1GB of onboard memory and its SD card slot with an 8GB card as standard to store your music and Mediascape will keep track of it for you while suggesting new songs and grabbing YouTube clips of your favourite bands.
Mediascape also gives you a visual record of the songs and artists you’ve been listening to most, complete with the album art, creating stacked timelines of your listening. Select an artist, press the Infinity button and Mediascape will collect the music and videos you own along with links to tracks in the Sony Ericsson PlayNow music store and YouTube videos featuring them.
Name that tune
As well as Mediascape’s skill at searching out tracks you might want to buy and YouTube clips of your favourite artists, the Xperia X10 features TrackID technology to identify songs that catch your ear.
TrackID is a free music recognition service built in to the Xperia X10. Simply fire it up, and the Xperia X10 will listen in to the song that’s playing using its microphone. It’ll then search a database to let you know the artist automatically. It’ll also perform its song searching trick when you’re using the Xperia X10’s FM radio, so you needn’t wait for the DJ to announce the track name before buying a copy for yourself.
Stream genius!
Because the Xperia X10 has high speed mobile web browsing with HSDPA, and Android gives you access to the full web, you can stream music and video from sites like Last.fm, YouTube and Vimeo. And with Android multi-tasking, you can install music streaming Android apps like Spotify to access vast libraries of songs on the go, even while you use other apps to get on with other things.
Video nicey!
As well as using the Xperia X10’s huge 4in screen to view your photos and video clips, you can record your own videos with its camera. The Xperia X10 will capture VGA (640 x 480) videos at 30fps and upload them straight to YouTube at the push of a button. And when it comes to watching video clips, the Xperia X10 will gobble up WMV and MP4 files too, making it a true portable movie machine!
