We’ve got a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini to play with. The little Android phone still has no set shipping date, but we’ve nabbed a pre-production sample for a preview. It’s the world’s smallest Android phone, but has it been kneecapped by such a shrunken screen? Read on and find out in our Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini preview – with bonus hands on photos!
We really didn’t know what to expect when we fired up the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini for the first time. Tiny Android phones like the HTC Tattoo and T-Mobile Pulse Mini haven’t exactly run like the wind, and with a 2.55-inch screen, Sony Ericsson’s effort is even smaller. Add to that our mixed feelings about the beefy Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 and its sometimes sluggish Timescape and Mediascape skin, and there was the potential for a miniature smartphone perfect storm.
But though the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini unit we tested isn’t a final version, its performance is still quite something. Android hasn’t been simply downscaled, but rejigged for the screen size, and though it’s the older Android 1.6, it’s the best small scale interpretation of Google’s OS we’ve tried yet.
That’s down to the hotpocket approach used throughout the Android UI on the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini: this phone has been designed to navigate with your thumbs, not your fingers, and it really works. Prod the edges of the responsive capacitive display, and you can summon shortcuts of your choosing – the web browser has been similarly adjusted to bring the most useful options to the fore, and you can only have one widget per screen (Having several running doesn’t drag down performance nearly as much as you’d expect).
Sony Ericsson’s flagship Timescape and Mediascape apps have also been adapted to better fit the layout. There are no separate feeds for Twitter, Facebook et al anymore, but one stream, and Mediacape is now nameless, only serving up relevant YouTube videos for music rather than getting clever with facetagging and photos. But we actually enjoyed the UX platform more here than on the original X10 – on such a large screen, we would have preferred simply using Twitter and Facebook apps, but this certainly matches HTC Sense on the HTC Tattoo for easy spying on your mates.
Our impressions of the build of the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini haven’t changed since we first played with the handset in Barcelona back in February, but it’s polished and more attractive than its low end rivals, even if a bit creaky along the bottom. The 3.5mm audio port is on the bottom of the phone, which makes it easy to stick in your pocket while you playback the tunes. The five megapixel camera produces decent results, especially in daylight (Sony Ericsson’s forte is the cameraphone, of course), loading and snapping quickly, and even VGA video recordings turn out well.
The downside? There’s no getting round typing problems on such a small display, even if it is capacitive. It’s fairly sharp, sure, but Sony Ericsson’s not even included an on screen QWERTY keyboard, so you’ll be left with the old school 0-9 layout for firing off missives. Anyone with pretensions to serious productivity with the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini had better look elsewhere – the QWERTY slide out X10 Mini Pro perhaps, which we’ve still to put through its paces.
Of course, it’s clear from our testing that the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini isn’t for anyone who pines for multiple Gmail accounts on Android, or Flash support. It’s a handbag phone for those who need to save on space, and would rather see what their friends are saying while on the go than pound out mobile essays on a touchscreen. If that’s you, well, we suspect you may be more than impressed by the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini.
We still don’t know when the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini ships, but registration is open over at Vodafone now so you can sign up for alerts. Based on our testing with this model, we can’t wait to find out.
