The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro, like its X10 Mini sibling, doesn’t use stock Android. Sony Ericsson has sensibly whittled Google’s OS down to meet the titchy 2.55-inch screen size, but has it sculpted a masterpiece or just cruelly hacked away at one? Find out in the software part of our Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro review.
Read the rest of our Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro review:
Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro review
Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro review: Keyboard and build
Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro review: What’s new
The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro’s skin is near identical to its X10 Mini brother, save for the additions necessitated by a physical keyboard – and that’s no bad thing. While we said the tweaks made the X10 Mini the best one handed Android smartphone yet, the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro tops it, simply by giving you the option of two handed use with a keyboard, at no real extra cost or pocket space used up.
The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro still works within the basic paradigms and conventions of Google’s operating system, but a few changes have been made to them to better accommodate the tiny screen size. You can only have one widget per homescreen, menus are 9×9 panes you can flick through, and it sports the X10 Mini’s pocket icon dock, which lets you customise each corner of the screen to trigger any app with a quick smush of your thumb – a nice touch that makes best use of the most unresponsive part of a phone’s display.
You could add the Facebook widget to one of the homescreens on your Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro, but you’ll find yourself using Timescape more often, since it’s just so pretty. Login, and you can see Twitter and Facebook feeds along with all your contacts’ communications, and thumb through them quickly. As with X10 Mini, it’s swift (perhaps more so than the original X10), only really dragging when syncing if you’re following a lot of people on Twitter. What might be more of an issue if you’re so concerned that you need a physical keyboard is how little interactivity there is: shortlinks in updates open the Twitter or Facebook mobile page rather than the site you want to go to, which might be a real pain if you’re more about contributing than consuming a little here and there.
Media is still stuck in the same halfway house as before, meanwhile. Playing music on the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro is a pleasure with its blown up cover art and Infinity button for pulling up more songs from an artist on YouTube. But you probably won’t use the latter option since videos look poor on the QVGA screen, and unlike Samsung, Sony Ericsson hasn’t improved Android’s fairly lame stock video format support. No biggie: you don’t buy a phone this size for video.
The only real changes are brought about by the addition of a keyboard. When the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro is shut, text input works as it does on the X10 Mini, with an on screen 0-9 pad and clever predictive text. Pop it open though, and the screen spins round into landscape mode (Very quickly too) – you can’t tilt it any other way, which we don’t mind at all. Text input in QWERTY mode doesn’t provide you with the same word suggestions while you type sadly, but the speed of physical keys more than makes up for this. We do wish we could see more than two lines in landscape mode while writing text messages, but since you can see a full six in Gmail, it’s not a dealbreaker.
Truth be told, the keyboard probably exacerbates a few issues we had with Android 1.6 on the X10 Mini: the 2009 brew of Android doesn’t support multiple Google accounts, something messaging fans might have their eye on. It’ll also hit you when you can’t run newer apps like the excellent official Twitter Android app (Google Maps Navigation, using the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro’s GPS, runs just fine however). And copy and pasting from website text is a guessing game with your fingertips. But having that top notch QWERTY keyboard should keep low maintenance social networkers happy indeed in their place.
Read the rest of our Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro review:
Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro review
Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro review: Keyboard and build
Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro review: What’s new
