Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10: Big Screen, Big Ambition, Old Android
30,000 Android apps, but your “flagship” can’t run half the new ones
Around 30,000 apps were already sitting in the Android Market when the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 showed up—and this supposed high-end flagship shipped with Android 1.6, unable to run a chunk of the newer stuff. For a device that spent a long time in development, that’s not a minor annoyance, it’s a strategic own goal.
Sony Ericsson clearly threw real hardware at its first Android phone: a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon, a 4-inch 854 x 480 capacitive display, and an 8MP camera with custom Cybershot-style UI. On paper, it’s right there with the big players of its era like the Nexus One and HTC Desire. In reality, the outdated OS and some baffling hardware limitations hold it back.
Hardware: Great screen, good build, but some weird compromises
The X10 is unapologetically big: 119 x 63 x 13 mm, very close to HTC’s HD2 footprint but about 20 grams lighter thanks to an all-plastic shell. There’s no metal, but the chassis is solid, with no creaks and tight panel fit. The matte plastic back resists fingerprints; the glossy front, not so much.
The 4-inch 854 x 480 capacitive display is easily one of the phone’s strongest points. Contrast is high, colors look good within the limits of Android 1.6’s 65K color output, and outdoor visibility is up there with the iPhone of its day. Touch responsiveness is excellent, and the Snapdragon keeps the UI feeling quick.
Then the weirdness kicks in. There’s no multi-touch support at all—Sony Ericsson later confirmed that’s a hardware limitation, so even the promised Android 2.1 update can’t fix it. The microSD slot is buried under the battery, so no hot-swapping. The 8MP camera has no lens cover, just a slight recess, so pocket carry is a gamble with your glass.
You do at least get modern basics: 3.5mm audio jack up top, microUSB (behind a plastic flap), hardware menu/home/back keys, and a dedicated camera shutter button plus volume rocker that doubles as zoom.
Software: Pretty skins on dated Android, plus Timescape/Mediascape
This is where Sony Ericsson’s delay really hurts. The X10 ships on Android 1.6 at a time when Android 2.0/2.1 was already live on multiple devices. That means older Market UI, missing double-tap zoom in the browser, and incompatibility with newer apps targeting later SDKs.
Sony Ericsson tries to distract you with heavy customization. You still get the basic Android structure—three homescreen panes, pull-up app drawer, notification shade—but nearly everything is skinned in a blue theme. The core logic is familiar; the visuals are very Sony.
The big bets are Timescape and Mediascape, two apps pitched as the phone’s differentiators.
Timescape is a unified communications hub: SMS, MMS, email, call log, Facebook, Twitter—aggregated in one feed with tabs for filtering by source. You can reply, call back, or update your status straight from there. You can even set it as your default homescreen UI, gaining nine communication-focused panes but losing the standard widget-based homescreens.
Mediascape does the same aggregation trick for media: music, photos, and video, with local and online content (Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, Sony Ericsson’s store) blended into one interface. It’s basically a media browser and player with a social layer on top.
The problem: both ideas are ahead of their implementation. Timescape is ambitious but over-centralizes around its own UI logic; Mediascape is more of a fancy file browser than a truly smarter media hub. Underneath, it’s still Android 1.6 with all the limitations that implies.
Performance, UI, and core experience
On raw performance, the X10 mostly delivers. The 1GHz Snapdragon and capacitive screen combo keeps the UI lively and fluid, and benchmarking against earlier HTC devices shows solid gains. The notifications shade works as expected, multitasking via long-press home shows your last six apps, and general navigation feels snappy for its generation.
The phonebook is visually reworked but still powerful, with extensive fields, Facebook/Twitter contact linking, and fast search via text or alphabet scroll. You can star favorites, and contact photos double as homescreen shortcuts.
Then you hit some head-scratchers. There’s no smart dialing in the dialer, and no voice dialing at all—features that other Android devices like the Hero and Legend managed to ship with. Messaging is conversation-threaded and functional, but the SMS composer wastes screen real estate, leaving a cramped text box on a 4-inch display. On the flip side, both portrait and landscape on-screen QWERTY keyboards are comfortable thanks to the big panel.
Social networking is everywhere: homescreen, phonebook, Timescape, and standalone apps. The integration depth is actually impressive for its time. If anything, it risks being overbearing.
Media and audio: Mediascape is clever, codec support isn’t
Mediascape splits content into Music, Video, and Photo tabs. Each shows recently added/played/viewed items and favorites at the top, with a lower section dedicated to online content if you’ve hooked up Facebook/Picasa/Flickr or Sony Ericsson’s media store.
Video is more basic: a simple thumbnail grid, with a major omission—no DivX/XviD support, and files using those codecs don’t even show up. Music and video players share a clean interface, but there’s no equalizer on the Android X10, even though Sony Ericsson’s own Symbian devices like Satio and Vivaz had them.
The photo gallery is Timescape-styled, portrait-first with vertical scrolling through thumbnails and filter options (Recently Viewed, Favorites, Albums, Friends). Rotation only kicks in when viewing a single image. Image browsing has noticeable lag, though zooming is decently quick. With no multi-touch, you’re stuck with zoom buttons or double-tap.
Sony Ericsson’s “Infinite” button is the clever bit. On tracks, albums, or photos, it surfaces related local content plus online matches, media store entries, relevant YouTube clips, and even a launch into Google search. It’s one of the more genuinely useful attempts at context-aware media navigation.
Audio output actually improves significantly after a firmware update, with excellent signal-to-noise, dynamic range, and low distortion, albeit still on the quiet side in sheer volume. It’s a rare case where post-launch software support clearly fixes a major technical weakness.
Camera: Strong 8MP stills, limited low light, WVGA video
Sony Ericsson leans on its Cybershot heritage for the X10 camera. You get an 8MP sensor with LED flash, maxing out at 3264 x 2448 resolution. The custom camera UI is rich: capturing modes (normal, scene recognition, smile detection, touch capture), multiple focus modes (single, multi, touch focus, macro, face detection, infinity), plus extended settings for geotagging, stabilization, self-timer, and even adjustable smile detection sensitivity.
Face recognition goes beyond detection: tag faces in photos and those tags link back to contacts, letting you jump to all photos of a person directly from the gallery or the Contacts app. A recent-shot tray along the bottom shows your last captures as thumbnails for quick review.
In good light, image quality is impressive for its time: excellent detail, low noise thanks to aggressive but effective noise reduction, and generally accurate colors. Shadows can be a bit underexposed, but there are no obvious lens or processing artifacts. A later firmware update doesn’t meaningfully change photo output.
Low light is where the LED flash’s limitations show. It’s fine for close-range people shots, but you’re not replacing a xenon-equipped camera phone here. Video tops out at WVGA (800 x 480) at around 27fps, recorded in MP4 with AAC audio. It’s a step below 720p in detail, but perfectly serviceable for casual clips.
Connectivity, browser, GPS, and apps
On the radio side, the X10 checks most boxes for its era: quad-band GSM/EDGE and three regional variants with tri-band 3G, plus 7.2Mbps HSDPA and 2Mbps HSUPA. Local connectivity includes Wi‑Fi b/g with DLNA, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and file transfers, and microUSB data.
The Android 1.6 browser renders pages quickly and accurately but lacks newer niceties. There’s no pinch-to-zoom (no hardware multi-touch), and even double-tap zoom is missing. Instead, you use +/– buttons or a “magnifying glass” mode that zooms out to full-page view and lets you drag a virtual loupe around. Text reflow works properly, keeping columns matched to screen width, and tabbed browsing is supported via a thumbnails grid—though bookmarks don’t get thumbnails.
There’s no Flash in-browser; YouTube is handled by a dedicated app that intercepts video links. That’s better than nothing, but obviously doesn’t help with broader Flash-heavy sites.
For productivity, you get Quickoffice as a viewer for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF, including Office 2007 formats. Editing requires a paid upgrade. The large, sharp screen makes reading documents comfortable, and Snapdragon horsepower keeps panning responsive. Calendar, improved calculator, and multi-alarm clock round out the basics.
GPS locks reasonably fast, faster with A‑GPS. Google Maps is preloaded with Street View and local search. Voice-guided Google Maps Navigation is limited to the US at the time, so Sony Ericsson bundles Wisepilot with a 30-day trial for full sat-nav. It works, has decent route options and overlays, but needs a paid license after the trial and relies on data—bad news for roaming. Android Market alternatives offer other navigation options, but remember: some of the best require newer Android versions.
The Android Market client is the older design, but structurally similar: featured apps, split into Applications/Games/Downloads, with categories under each. Search is straightforward, ratings and user comments are there, and around 30k apps are available. The catch is OS fragmentation: plenty of newer apps demand Android 2.0/2.1, which the X10 just doesn’t have at launch.
Verdict: ambitious first Android, dragged down by its foundation
Sony Ericsson clearly didn’t half-commit to its first Android phone. The hardware is ambitious—big, high-res capacitive screen, 1GHz Snapdragon, 8MP camera, strong connectivity. Timescape and Mediascape are genuine attempts to rethink how you handle communication and media, not just lazy icon packs.
But calling this a flagship while it’s running Android 1.6, without multi-touch support, no smart dialing, no DivX/XviD, and missing newer app compatibility is a hard sell. Especially when contemporaries like the Nexus One and HTC Desire ship with newer Android versions, multi-touch, AMOLED panels, and more RAM, even if they can’t match the X10’s camera.
Sony Ericsson promises an Android 2.1 update that will at least unlock full 16M color support on the display, but that still won’t fix the hardware-level multi-touch issue. And relying on promises to justify a purchase is never a great consumer strategy.
So the XPERIA X10 ends up as a “nearly there” device: a huge leap for Sony Ericsson compared to its older phones, an actually strong cameraphone with some smart UI ideas—but undermined by an outdated OS base and several avoidable omissions. If this was a mid-ranger, those compromises would be easier to forgive. As a high-end debut, it feels like Sony Ericsson showed up late to the Android party and then forgot to bring the right software.
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