2009-11-24 17:40:41 - Just as Android fans are almost sure the holidays would bring them the first Android smartphone from Sony Ericsson, we only got its official announcement straight from the horse’s mouth early November that the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 will be released after the New Year, sometime in the first quarter. No definite date and no price information to this date. And yes, it’s the X10 not X3. But they’re one and same.

It seems Sony didn’t like the idea of competing with the recently released Nokia X3 which carries the same designation, so it’s better to get over the potential confusion and had it renamed the Xperia X10.

Not only that, the Rachel user interface we’ve come to talk about for months now has also been renamed UX or User eXperience, which Sony

Ericsson claims is a better match to the Xperia name. We thought so too.

High End Features

Expansys got the courage to release the X3 specs weeks before the official X10 announcement but it carried only rumours about the possible name change. No matter, the official technical data sheet which you can also find at the Sony Ericsson website simply confirms the specs that have circulated among mobile phone blogs and forums. Nothing has changed, except those name changes.

Its hardware specs should be familiar to most people who have visited mobile phone blogs about the X3 but just to refresh your memory, the Xperia X10 has features that quality it to sit atop the mobile phone totem pole, as it were. It is rivaled by the Acer Liquid A1 both in looks and features, not to mention the fact that they both use the powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon processor.

Superlative looks is matched by superlative hardware features that include a massive 4” capacitive touchscreen display with 16 million colors and an auto-rotate accelerometer. Its 8.1 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash, geo-tagging, face recognition, 8X digital zoom and VGA video recording at 30fps makes the X10 virtually untouchable among imaging mobile phones.

Software wise, you get some nifty integration features like Timescape which puts together all the varied communication features so you filter search by name and in one glance the status of messages for that name whether it’s email, text, instant message, or social networking update. There’s Mediascape which does the same thing for entertainment features, allowing the user, for instance, to tap on a photo-tagged imaged to make a call.

Getting Rachel to do its Best

We think Sony Ericsson has some more homework to do to bring its Rachel-flavored Android 1.6 to its optimum performance. The specimen we played with during the presentation event in London was a mixed bag of good and bad impressions. There’s no multitouch, short battery life and sluggish Rachel response on some functions. We figured Sony Ericsson may have some problems porting their Rachel or UX to the newer Android 2.0 so they’re just making do with the older version.

Hopefully, the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 gets around these shortfalls and still maintain as edge over emerging new Android phones using the newer Android version come Q1 next year. Otherwise, Sony Ericsson could be facing an awful start this coming new year.

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