The application “XperiaTweak” lets you tweak your Xperia X1 without using the registry editors. While editing registry by the pro-users is not a big thing, but it can be a daunting task for the newbies. XperiaTweak lets you tweak various features of the Xpearia in a safe and fast manner.
Enter the mobile world where you can have 800 x 480 pixels screen, 3″ display, a sexy, yet bold exterior, a slide-out keyboard, BT 2.0, WiFi, GPS, push-email, FM radio, 3G, HSDPA and most important of all, the brand name: SONY ERICSSON
History
SONY is not new to the PDA world. It had it’s own very popular and dedicated range of handhelds few years back, called “CLIÉ”. Due to numerous reasons, the whole “CLIÉ” range was brought to hault. Who at that time had thought that after few years, Sony would come out with a WIndows Mobile phone! Well, enough history. The Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 may not be the ultimate phone in the market, but surely it is the best you can get, if you want windows mobile.
Looks, Build, Design
Most of the casing is made from metal, which looks very nice and attractive. Well, there is nothing to get surprised here as it is made by HTC, the leading manufacturer of Windows Mobile devices. Looks like, Sony Ericsson didn’t want to make any compromises on build-quality. It looks pretty nice in black with silver stipes around the sides.
The Xperia is not bitten by the Touch bug. It has a lot of buttons in the front unlike Touch HD (reviewed here) and Touch Pro (reviewed here). It is a micro-SD card hidden under the battery door, which can be mounted as a mass-storage device, if required.
The power button is on the top along with the 3.5mm audio jack.
Display, screen
The screen as mentioned before, is 3″ in size. It sports WVGA (800 x 480) resolution (same as sported by ASUS EEE 700 series!) and everything looks very crisp including text and images. The display is not flushed to the body like the Touch Diamond, Touch HD and Touch Pro, but it still looks very fine.
The touchscreen is quite responsive. There is no finger friendly keyboard from SE unlike HTC, but it can easily be cured by installing one of the great soft keyboards (SPB keyboard, Resco keyboard etc).
Great Keyboard
The Sony Ericsson X1 has goen with an arc-slider design for the keyboard. It has 4 row keyboard whose keys provides just a bit of travel. It is not the best keyboard out there, but not the worst too. It is quite usable for doing some short emails, messaging, entering URLs etc. Just like other slider QWERTY keyboard windows mobile phones, the display auto-switches to landscape orientation as-soon-as you slide out the keyboard.
Panels
The Sony Ericsson has highlighted the panels a lot in their promotional videos and other advertisements. Panels provide new way of looking at the today screen. Pressing the hardware panel button brings you to the panel screen from where you can select a particular panel, which actually changes the way your today screen looks. So, depending the type of task required, you can change the panel as needed.
Selecting the SPB mobile shell panel makes the phone all of a sudden very finger friendly due to excellent interface provided by Mobile Shell. The best part of it is that it is absolutely free! There is a facebook panel too.
It fairly takes 2 seconds to change the panel. You cannot disable the panels.
Web-Browsing
Decent web browsing has become a must-have feature for any premium mobile phone. Sony Ericsson has bundled the excellent Opera Mobile 9.5 browser which does an excellent job of rendering the web pages.
Camera
The camera on the SE XPERIA X1 is 3.2MP. Why SE didn’t go with the 5MP one is beyond me. The Xperia is one expensive device and it should have come with 5MP camera. It has ‘touch focus’ feature that lets you select focal point on the picture you are taking by touching the screen.
It also has a ‘flash’
As a phone
The call quality is pretty nice. You don’t have to put the earpiece volume maximum to hear the other party. The X1 has nice cell radio. It even catches signals where other windows mobiles cannot even pick up signals.
Final verdict
So, do we have a winner? By winner, if you mean an iPhone killer, then no. If you mean, the best windows mobile device so far, then yes.
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Pros
Cons
$799, unlocked at SonyStyle.com
Here is a another 10″ netbook which is targeted at the local market. It is released by a German computer maker, MaxData. The Belinea o.book 1XS is priced at 339 Euros.
There is nothing very exciting in this device. Just plain Jane netbook specs:
Continue reading “Belinea o.Book 1XS, made in Germany, made for Germany”
Apple has introduced in-ear headphones for just $79. Well, what does it make it so different from the other headphones in the market. There are three reasons for it: Firstly, it is made by Apple. Secondly, it has built-in woofer and tweeter. Thirdly, it is Apple (again I know!). It is shocking that is not compatible with the iPhone. It comes with these things in the box:
Well, this is from a Malaysian who bought this from Russia. Here is the sad part, he does not know Russian and since he is in Malaysia, he cannot test WiMax.
Here are few quotes from his review,
The specs of the device is pretty much a beefed up htc Diamond. Bigger screen (3.8″), widescreen resolution (640×800), lots of memory (8GB+microSD expansion). Of course, it comes with WiMAX apart from the WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and GSM/EDGE connectivity.
The htc Max lives up to it’s name. It’s big, heavy and thick.
You can call anyone within Yota network using WiMAX instead of GSM.
I couldn’t enjoy the full benefit of using Yota’s services, nor could I enjoy the phone due to my poor Russian (hahaha…). The phone is a little large for most people’s preference, but the big screen certainly is better than the tiny Diamond. But this device certainly sets a benchmark for all WiMAX devices to come. Continue reading “HTC MAX/ HTC Quartz/ HTC T8290 review”
We posted about the white touch Diamond a couple of months back, but we could see it in flesh. One of the visitors of my website sent me the link to the dailymobile.se who have pictures of the Touch Diamond white.
I still find the black version prettiest. May be thats me.
Other than the change in color, nothing else has changed. Of course, you get a matching white stylus to go with the white color and that is where the differences end.
Thanks Jake for the tip!
Nokia today announced that it has completed its offer to acquire Symbian Limited. All conditions to Nokia’s offer to acquire Symbian Limited have been satisfied and it has received valid acceptance of greater than 99.9% of the total Symbian shares that Nokia did not already own. Symbian is the software company that develops and licenses Symbian OS, the market-leading open operating system for mobile devices.
All Symbian employees are planned to become Nokia employees on February 1, 2009.
iPlus in Poland have already started selling the 3G version of the NC10 with 4 different types of contracts to choose from.
From what I could make out, out of Polish, they are giving NC10 with slightly different specs:
No no! This is not a HTC Tilt. Look carefully. It is the new Nokia N97. Nokia N97 is the new N-series phone from Nokia, which also sports a touch-screen!
It has 360 x 640 resolution (where do you get these numbers?) touchscreen. It also has haptic feedback along with the following:
My friend, who was there at the launch event, was able to get a hands-on the N97 and has said that they slide mechanism is very nicely designed. It keyboard flushes with the unit and the whole unit then feels like one part.
Here is the Press Release: Continue reading “Presenting Nokia N97”
HIS is a graphic card manufacture that is going to jump into Netbook bandwagon. HIS is going to launch a netbook, which is actually a rebranded just-another-msi-wind-u100.
It is going to be released in India for price of around $400. I would not recommend to buy it as one can purchase the Wind U100 directly for the same price! Specs are same as Wind U100, but here they go again anyway: Continue reading “HIS netbook = another re-branded MSI Wind”
