Sony Ericsson Xperia X1

The Xperia X1 is Sony Ericssson’s first proper attempt at a smartphone since, well, ever. The P800, P900, P910i and P990i all had their plus points, but these Symbian-powered peculiarities stuck too much to the quirky R380 formula to seriously compete against the heavyweight Windows Mobile.

The Xperia X1, on the other hand, is much more straightforward.  It’s a sexy-looking slider that runs Windows Mobile 6.1 – but that’s not to say Sony Ericsson hasn’t slipped in a few special features of its own.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the Xperia X1 is its design – it is stunning. With just about every exposed surface clad in either brushed or polished aluminium, it looks more like the kind of improbable film prop that has geeks muttering “if only…” than a fully functional smartphone.

There’s some nice attention to detail too, most notably the sliding mechanism itself. Rather than fix the sliding screen to a mere hinge so that it can be manually angled for typing (as on the HTC TyTN II), it slides open on a curved track that leaves it in the ideal position when it’s extended. Clever stuff.

Once the initial dazzle has worn off though, there are few less appealing design touches that come to light. First are the shiny black plastic buttons below the screen. Not only do these cheapen the look of the Xperia X1, but they’re also tricky to press, which is a pain when two of them are used to answer and end calls. The two soft keys that sit just below the screen are metal, but they’re extremely narrow and again, more awkward to press than they should be.

The square four-way control pad is similarly fiddly, but at least you don’t have to use it – the centre button doubles as an optical touch-pad, much like that on the Samsung Omnia SGH-i900. There’s no on-screen mouse pointer option and while it takes lots of finger swipes to move the selection highlight around, it works well enough for most purposes.

With an 800 x 480 resolution, the Xperia X1’s touch-sensitive screen ought to be its crowning feature and it is wonderfully crisp and bright. Unfortunately, it’s only three inches from corner to corner and so while text is pin-sharp, it’s tiny. This is a huge missed opportunity – the HTC Touch HD has the same resolution, but its screen has a much more comfortable 3.8in diagonal.

For some silly reason, Sony Ericsson has also left a lip of aluminium around the Xperia X1’s screen, which gets in the way when prodding the corners with a finger. You could just fish out the stylus, but a flush-fitting screen (like on just about every other premium smartphone) would be a better option – and be far more in keeping with the X1’s otherwise slick design.

There’s a few minutes of please to had from sliding the screen open and closed – its curved track is a simple, but novel way to tilt the display towards you and it locks into place with a pleasant snap. Unfortunately, Sony Ericsson hasn’t put as much design effort in the Xperia X1’s keyboard and while the silver keys look great, they’re small, have a very low profile and are quite closely spaced. This makes typing something of a chore, particularly on the top row of letters, where your thumb tends to bash against the bottom edge of the screen.

Windows Mobile has long since lost its appeal since the iPhone showed how a mobile user interface should work, which is why handset manufacturers have been developing their own simpler, more stylish (usually) front-end software. After all, why go the all the effort of designing a super-stylish smartphone when the first thing you see is the dull Windows Mobile Today screen?

Sony Ericsson hasn’t gone so far as HTC or Samsung with its interface polishing, but it has made a few welcome tweaks. Press its ‘X Panel’ button and a number of animated thumbnails appear. These are shortcuts to various X Panel applications – various shiny (and highly customisable) Today screens, a media player, Google Apps, and so on. Seven such ‘panels’ are installed by default and others can be downloaded – all six of them… Sony Ericsson has released an X Panel SDK though, so more may appear eventually.

The X Panel can be flipped into two layouts – one that resembles Mac OS Exposé and another that looks like Windows Vista Flip 3D. The sluggish response of the display to touch-screen input makes both less than pleasurable to use though, and both HTC’s Touch FLO 3D and Spb Mobile Shell do a much better job. And oddly enough, the former has already been hacked for the Xperia X1 and the latter is one of the few X Panel additions available for download so far.

We had high hopes for the Xperia X1 (well, as high as they can be for a Windows Mobile 6 device), but it failed to meet our expectations at almost every level. We still think it’s gorgeous and if you ever get to handle one yourself, you’ll find yourself inexplicably reaching for your wallet – resist. The HTC Touch Pro pretty much matches the Xperia X1 feature-for-feature, but is considerably easier to use – and it doesn’t look half bad, either.