We couldn’t just let the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro and Sony Ericsson Aspen lie around on the desk next to each other without their very reasons for being – a full QWERTY keyboard – being put to the test. Naturally, we pitted them off in a fight for the fastest keys and threw the Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro in to the mix to make it a triple threat. It’s Android versus Windows Mobile and landscape versus portrait in the battle of the boards – read on to find out the surprise victor!
To make it a fair fight, we took random paragraphs from our Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini review, and blitzed them out, aiming to spell everything correctly, with proper punctuation and upper case lettering where required. The results are below, and just to give you some sort of control for the experiment, we can hit 40-50 WPM on a BlackBerry Bold 9700, without any punctuation errors or misspelling.
Sony Ericsson X10 Mini Pro
We suspected the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini Pro would do well beforehand, and we were right. They keyboard, though landscape, is small enough to give you the benefits of using two thumbs that keeps BlackBerry addicts chained to their ageing phones. The buttons are firm and won’t drop you onto other keys by accident, and though they’re small, they’re well spaced apart. There’s even a dedicated comma button, something BlackBerrys don’t have. Android helps speed things up also, adding full stops instead of double spaces, though its auto punctuation doesn’t match that on RIM’s software, at least not by default.
Score: 32 words per minute
Sony Ericsson Aspen
Before we got hold of the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro and Sony Ericsson Aspen to test, we genuinely suspected this would floor the competition. For hardcore emailers, portrait QWERTYs are still the way to go. Sadly though, it doesn’t quite live up to expectations: the software is perfectly speedy, and like Android inserts full stops and capitalises, but the keys aren’t as good as the Mini Pro’s. Our particular foible is that the extra comma key, while a nice gesture, pushes the M very close to the middle of the phone. It’s not symmetrical, and means you’ll quite often hit the N instead.
Score: 29 words per minute
Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro
We’re not going to beauty about the bush here. The Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro is an also ran in these stakes. While our only real grumble with the build of the keyboard is that space bar is small and set very low down, so it’s hard to define, Symbian, as ever, mucks things up. It’s slow, doesn’t capitalise or add periods automatically, and worst of all, bafflingly buggy. We actually had to reset the phone to stop the Shift button from opening up a menu, rather than just, you know, acting as a Shift button. Buy for the camera, not the typing skills.
Score: 22 words per minute
So there, you have it: the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro beats the Sony Ericsson Aspen. We’ll have more in our full Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro review coming next week, but it’s a big thumbs up for the little Google phone’s QWERTY. To be fair, the results are still very close – we’re confident that on both we can get very close to the speeds achievable on a BlackBerry. But it does show that the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro has a real and genuine one up over the touchscreen only Mini.
Thanks to Clove.co.uk for the loan of the Sony Ericsson Aspen
