Jenneth Orantia29 January 2009, 9:00 AM
Our first hands-on experience with the X1 at a Telstra presso last year was a memorable occasion.
Not only had it been nearly a year since we’d first heard of this high-end, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink smartphone, but after railing about the lack of native Facebook client for Windows Mobile, we were thrilled to find the presenter showing off a custom Facebook app on the X1 demo units.
Turns out it was one of the many ‘panels’ that come preloaded on the X1 that utilises Sony Ericsson’s Panel interface - an application layer that sits on top of Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional – which lets you completely change the look and feel of the home screen with a couple of clicks. If you’re using your X1 as a portable media player, for instance, you could load the Media Experience panel, which has the same flashy XMB interface used on the PlayStation 3 and Sony Ericsson’s Walkman.
Up to nine panels can be loaded at a time, accessed by pressing a dedicated hardware button on the X1’s face. Other panels include a Google panel, FM radio panel and Sony Ericsson widget panel, and more can be downloaded from the Sony Ericsson web site. There’s also a developer kit available for creating third-party panels, but as yet we haven’t seen any new ones.
That aside, the X1 is pretty standard as far as Windows Mobile smartphones go. The usual productivity, internet and multimedia applications that come with the operating system are on board, and Sony Ericsson has also thrown in the excellent Opera Mobile 9.5 web browser, Google Maps and a task manager for managing open applications from the Today screen.
The fact that it’s got tri-band 7.2Mbit/s HSDPA, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, A-GPS and Bluetooth 2.0 isn’t enough to get us hot under the collar anymore – most mid- to high-end smartphones offer these features as a matter of course – but it’s good to see Sony Ericsson hasn’t omitted any of the essentials.
Of more interest is the X1’s hardware design. It’s similar to the HTC Touch Pro, with a large touchscreen on the front and a full QWERTY keyboard, but there are subtle differences that make the X1 stand out. For one, the screen is slightly larger at three inches, and it has a resolution of 800 x 480 – the highest we’ve seen yet on a smartphone.
It also has more buttons on the front: two soft keys that correspond to the on-screen menus, call buttons, the panel and OK button, and a five-way navigation pad with a centre key that doubles as a touchpad. The upside of this busy control area is that you don’t have to use the stylus and touchscreen as much, but it’s cramped. The call buttons in particular have been shunted off to the sides and aren’t as easy to press as the other keys.
Not content with only one or two LED indicators, Sony Ericsson has equipped the X1 with no less than four disco-style LEDs – two on each side – that flash for events like a missed call, low battery or new message. We like the idea, but with the X1 sitting on a desk or in your hand, you don’t actually notice the LEDs flashing on each side.
We’ve seen too many smartphone keyboards let down by stiff buttons, poor tactile feedback and cramped layouts; thankfully, the X1 doesn’t join that rank. The four-row keyboard slides out from the left with a satisfying click (which also changes the display’s orientation to landscape), and the screen pushes up on a slight curve that makes it easier to see the screen while you’re typing. The buttons are small but comfortably-spaced, with generously-sized space bar and Enter keys, and buttons dedicated to commonly-used symbols like the full stop, comma, apostrophe and @. The buttons are a little flatter than we’d like, but excellent tactile feedback makes that an easy sin to forgive.
As good as the hardware keyboard is, the on-screen software keyboard is a bit of a joke. It’s the standard Windows Mobile QWERTY keyboard, but as the X1’s screen is unusually narrower, the keyboard is commensurately smaller and impossible to use without the stylus. In that respect, we really wish Sony Ericsson had licensed HTC’s excellent software keyboards (used on the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro).
One thing the X1 doesn’t have much of compared to its nearest competitor, the Touch Pro, is style. HTC is actually the OEM for the X1, but the Taiwanese company seems to have saved all of its style mojo for its own products. The X1 isn’t ugly – the brushed aluminium on the front and back and chrome frame around the middle give it a distinctive look – but the bulky lines and recessed display make it seem a generation behind.
From a multimedia standpoint, the X1 is above average, offering 3.2-megapixel camera (with auto-focus, flash and video recording), FM radio, a 3.5mm earphone jack (take that Touch Pro!), and a decent external speaker. There’s 512MB of memory on-board, and a microSD card slot for adding more memory (a 4GB microSD card comes standard in the box). The Media Experience panel’s gorgeous user interface is leagues ahead of any other media player we’ve seen on Windows Mobile, letting you navigate swiftly through pictures, music, videos, games and contacts using the cross media bar.
The X1 backs this boatload of functionality up with some serious horsepower in the engine room: a 528MHz Qualcomm MSM7200 processor, 256MB of ROM and a 1,500mAh Li-Polymer battery. Still, the X1’s performance was a concern – in particular, the Panels interface was buggy and prone to locking up the system, and we had to reset the phone a lot during testing. That said, our review unit was a prototype and the software build wasn’t final, so hopefully the kinks are ironed out on shipping units.
Battery life is quoted as 6 hours of talk time and 640 hours (or 26 days) of standby time; in practice, we only got around a day’s worth of medium to heavy use. The X1 uses a standard mini-USB connector, and comes with both a wall charger and USB sync cable in the box, plus a spare stylus in case you lose the one it comes with.
The final note we’ll make about the X1 is with regards to its pricetag. $1,499 outright is a lot to ask, especially now that you can get a netbook for less than half that much, but Sony Ericsson tries extra hard to make it worth your while by including an extended service offer with the phone. Purchasers of the X1 get a support number that puts them through to a specialised team, and a travellers service lets you get a replacement X1 courier delivered to you in most countries if the phone stops functioning in the first 12 months – a boon for frequent fliers that rely on their smartphones for work.