Category: Windows Phone

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.

—

Pros

• 3″ WVGA display
• Excellent panel concept
• Solid construction
• Good looks
• Fast
• Ample RAM
• Built in keyboard
• Mass-storage device support

Cons

• No bundled finger friendly keyboard
• Not much tactile feedback from keyboard
• No 5MP camera
• Expensive

$799, unlocked at SonyStyle.com

In the past week, we reviewed Skyfire. We also published that the upcoming version of the Opera will let you view youtube videos inside the browser window itself. This clearly shows how powerful the web browsers are becoming every day.

History

Few years back, Netfront was the only viable Internet Explorer mobile(then, Pocket Internet Explorer) alternative that offered more features than the Internet Explorer mobile. With the introduction of iPhone last year, which offered very robust internet experience forced other internet software houses to make their products better.

Heavy emphasis started to be given on:

• finger friendly UI
• desktop class rendering
• access to desktop sites from the mobile device

Opera Mobile 9.5 paved the way for providing great mobile internet experience to the Windows mobile users. It has been a great success for the windows mobile users as-well-as for the windows mobile brand. Netfront used to be the user’s choice during the non-opera days. After the Opera mobile was launched, it started giving tough competition to the Netfront. It nearly took the whole game away from the Netfront after the release of revolutionary Opera Mobile 9.5.

We all thought Netfront by access was dead as the last official version of Netfront(version 3.3) was released nearly 3 years back! Access did released a couple of betas. Now, after a long period of time, they have come up with Concept version of Netfront browser v3.5. So, does this newly release concept version promises to give users the ultimate mobile experience. Does the Netfront browser holds any chance of regaining it’s lost market share? Read on to find out

Installation

I installed the just released Netfront v3.5 concept version from their official site(link here). The installation went ok and the Access site suggests to install it in the main memory as it may cause instability issues if installed in the storage card. Even I have always advised the users to install browsers and today plugins in the main memory.

Internet Experience

So, how does the browser performs? Well, it behaves the opposite way most of the current slew of web browsers behave. When you open a web page on the netfront, it opens the page in zoom-in mode. This is unlike Opera mobile(on windows mobile) and Safari(on Apple iPhone and iPod Touch), which open the web page in zoom-out mode. The user then taps into the required section and then the web browser zooms in to that section.

The netfront opens the web page in the zoom out mode. The text is wrapped around the window for easy reading just like Opera Mobile.

Double tapping into any region would pop up a little window which shows you the overview of the page. Then, you can use your finger to move around the various parts of the page.

Whenever you do scrolling, you can also see that the pageMap thumbnail appears on the top-left corner. This lets you scroll up and down.

Browsing speed

I did notice some speed improvements over its previous official version, but I found it to be little slow when compared to Opera Mobile. Skyfire seemed to be the fastest, but it follows a totally different approach (processes data at its Skyfire server)

Bookmarks

The way the bookmarks are implemented in the new version is simply fantastic. Dragging your finger/stylus in clockwise/anti clockwise direction will take you to the adjacent bookmark. Very nicely done!

What I look out for in the final build?

I’m definitely looking forward to the final version to provide native viewing of youtube videos inside the browser window. You cannot use plugins in the concept version. Also, I would want netfront folks to make the whole UI more finger-friendly. Are they not aware that it is the era of touch-friendly devices? They have made no changes to the UI when compared to the version 3.3.

Also, there is no progress bar which shows the user the progress of the page that has loaded so far.

You can download the latest Netfront v3.5 Concept version (for free right now) from the following link:

http://www.access-company.com/products/mobile_solutions/netfrontmobile/browser/35_wm_tp.html

The designer of this skin describes the suit as “A New Revolution”. He is not wrong when he says it especially when you look at the quality of the skin suit.

Continue reading “Brief Overview: Ind05 Suit by Nascasho Designs for Wisbar Advance 3, PocketBreeze, PsShutXP”

There are many times things can go wrong if you install an application that is not made to work on your device. Safe Mode 3 comes to rescue!

Features:

• Windows Mobile 5 / 6.x support
• Pre-boot startup: only known Windows Mobile system applications are started before SafeMode
• Replaced “Start” menu with custom SafeMode utilities menu
• SafeDirect: enter / exit SafeMode directly, without an additional soft reset
• Smaller memory footprint (90 KB)

It is priced at $9.95 (ouch!). But, if it can help you protect your data and can rescue your device, then it may be a bad deal at all!

Visit monocube.com for more details

Yes! This is not a mirage. It is reality. Thanks to great folks at xda-devs, who have impressive knowledge about finding ways to get things working. A day before yesterday, we reviewed Skyfire, which has the ability to run a youtube and flash content inside the browser window itself.

The upcoming build (2808) of Opera Mobile will let you do exactly that! The download instructions are provided at the end of this post. Also, instructions of how to install and get the stuff working are provided at the end of this post.

About the youtube video

It is working. At low framerates (~7-12fps perhaps), but it is working. Sound output is perfect. Video quality is ok. Also, the Opera Mobile behaves a little weird. It pops up the SIP every time it encounters a flash object (including youtube (flv) video)

Is the flash working?

Continue reading “Youtube and Flash working inside Opera Mobile”