The well received Sony Xperia X10 has had a little facelift. In an attempt to broaden its appeal the manufacturers have made the device attractively smaller, but at the same time somehow incorporated a Qwerty keypad within its now tiny frame.
Although the dimensions of the phone have been played with, the User Interface has wisely been left alone. Running the excellent Timescape UI, the menus look very sleek. In an effort to keep the home screens minimal, Timescape neatly groups relevant information together. For example, rather than having separate functions for e mails, messages, social networking etc, simply calling up a contact now displays message and e mail history along with social networking updates as well as other information. This idea works well, and of course there are individual applications available should you need them. The operating system of this handset is Google Android, hence the various preinstalled apps including Google Mobile and Google Talk. Multimedia playback is supported thanks to the inbuilt Mediascape widget. This supports audio and video and covers a range of formats. Video you have recorded on the handset can also be displayed, or if you prefer uploaded direct to YouTube. Making all of these features run quickly and smoothly is an 800 Mhz processor.
The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro comes with 128mb of on board memory, but the inclusion of a microSD slot allows upgrading of this up to 16GB. This memory comes into handy for the media features which include the camera facility, which captures images at a high resolution of 5 million pixels. Throw into the mix video capture and you can see that the handset is really well specified.
It would be unfair to talk about the Xperia X10 Mini Pro without talking about its size. Weighing just 120 grammes and measuring 90 x 52 x 17mm, the unit is very small considering how powerful this phone actually is, being more similar in measurements to one of the more feature free fashion phones rather than a fully functioning smartphone. The 2.55″ Capacitive touchscreen responds very well to the slightest touch, as well as showing a crisp 240 x 320 resolution. Throw into the equation the 16 million colours and you have a quality of screen that matches the already impressive behind the scenes features. The full Qwerty keypad slides out when you turn the phone onto its side, meaning easy composition of messages and e mails. There are four rows of keys, and although small, the keypad is still larger than the one found on the palm pre.
As far as phones to look forward to in 2010 go, the Xperia X10 Mini Pro is really a frontrunner. It will satisfy the smartphone lovers and the style lovers alike thanks to its small frame, sleek finish and impressive feature list, backed up by the heavyweight Google Android operating system. This really is a phone to watch this year.
