The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 is huge, sleek and powerful, but can it beat the HTC Desire at its own game?

Appearance
Whilst the Xperia X1 was a lame attempt by Sony Ericsson to enter into the touchscreen market, the Xperia X10 is a different story. They have gone down the same route as HTC have used in the likes of the Desire and Legend with a huge 4″ touchscreen. I am split on whether the phone’s design is effective or not, as the curved front and minimalistic design do definitely give it a sleek look, it still manages to come accross as slightly cheap and plastic. It’s problem is that it sits between the areas other competitors have gone for. It does not look as professional as the Desire’s matt plastic finish or as sexy as the Legend.

Camera
The camera, like the Vivaz, is an 8.1 megapixel camera with a tonne of features – 16x digital zoom, geotagging, facial detection, image stabiliser and flash. As well as face detection, the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 has the bonus addition of smile detection, which shoots the picture only when it recognises a detected face smiling. This is actually really useful and means your subject isn’t left waiting with a strained smile, as the camera picks the right moment to take the photo for you.

There is even another level of cleverness in this camera, as the Xperia X10 has a built in facial recognition app that allows you to store 5 of your friends’ faces that will then be immediately recognised when you are taking a photo of them.

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Operating System & Interface
Here Sony Ericsson have layered Google’s Android OS with their own user interface as HTC have done HTC Sense. SE features such as Timescape, which collects all contacts and communications together. This means you only need to visit one place to pick up all your Facebook messages, Tweets, emails and text messages. Mediascape allows you to do the same bringing together with all your media – music, photos and videos. What is nice about these interfaces is that they are fully customisable, so you are not stuck with lots of feeds that you don’t use or videos you never watch. You can display exactly as much or as little as suits you.

Touchscreen
The huge screen of the Xperia X10 is fantastic. It makes taking a viewing your photos a pleasure. The clever face detection technology means that you can touch the face of a person in a photo you’ve taken and it will take you through to their contact page. This is a new technology and it’s not 100% successful at recognising faces, it works around 85%, which is surprisingly effective.

The touchscreen works well, its large size of course means the phone itself won’t easily sllip into your pocket, but most of the latest smartphones won’t either, and like its competitors, the touchscreen on the Xperia X10 displays whatever you’re doing with perfect clarity.

Multitasking isn’t yet present on the Xperia X10 and none seems quite sure if a fix will come out for this or if this is a hardware problem.

Battery

What is exceptional here is that the battery life of the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 isn’t limited that much even by the power hungry 1Ghz processor. The HTC Desire has found its battery life reduced to just 360 hours on standby but the Xperia X10 will keep going strong for 425 hours. By regular standards, this isn’t great, but for a smartphone with the power this has, it is nothing short of incredible.

Extras
The Xperia X10 has aGPS and integrated with Google Maps this allows for Wisepilot Turn-by-Turn navigation software that works like a dream with the big screen and powerful 1Ghz Snapdragon processor.

The design and interface is probably the most sleek and sexy we’ve seen Sony Ericsson come out with and definitely their best touch screen phone to date. Power, beauty and no Satio software issues. While the Desire may be just a little bit more polished, the Xperia X10 will run it very close and for many people it will just come down to personal taste rather than being a definite judgement call.

QUICK-FIRE FEATURES
Display: 4” TFT resistive touchscreen
Weight: 135g
Dimensions: 119 x 63 x 13 mm
Camera: 8.1MP (autofocus, facial recognition, LED flash, 16x digital zoom, smile detection)
Video: Supported
Music player: MP3, AAC
Operating system: Android Donut 1.6
Processor: 1Ghz Snapdragon
Memory: 1GB phone memory, 8GB SD card included
Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.1, microUSB
Internet: HSUPA, HSDPA, EDGE, wifi, 3G

 ★★★★½ 

GO TO SONY ERICSSON XPERIA X10 ON VODAFONE – free from £35pm

GO TO SONY ERICSSON XPERIA X10 – £489.99 SIM FREE / UNLOCKED