I’m sick of the incessant flashing of it’s LED for no discernable purpose, I’m sick of it randomly turning itself off (this was a problem even before the battery died), I’m sick of the spinning hourglass of death and, above all, I’m sick of staring at an operating system which doesn’t appear to have changed much since I was hawking 7230s back in 2003. So, I decided it was time to begin my search.
Onward and Backward
In order to look forward in the technology arena, sometimes one has to look backwards. Much as I tend to compare the offerings of modern operating systems to the venerable BeOS, every new mobile devices gets compared to what was inarguably the best cellphone ever created: The Nokia 6310i.
It cost me a pretty penny when I nabbed it on a hardware upgrade 7 years ago, but not only was it one of those fancy new GSM phones, it was tri-band GSM so it’d work if I ever decided to hop across the pond. Throw in Bluetooth, call quality that is on par (if not surpasses) most landlines and a feather-light lithium polymer battery that to this day (as recently as a month ago) would last almost 2 weeks under heavy usage and you’ve got something that, when bottled, would be sweeter than Yoo-Hoo.
I’d very briefly considered getting another Blackberry, but as I dug through the latest offerings, I really didn’t see any “killer” features beyond those which already existed on my Curve 8310 and, if Rogers is going to have me on the hook for another 3 years, I’d rather it was because I’d actually gotten something out of it. Never at any point was the iPhone even a distant consideration as being a serf in Steve Jobs’ private fiefdom holds no appeal for me and I’d lose sleep all 1,095 nights of my contract knowing I’d helped to enable his dickery.
Thankfully there’s a third option these days (beyond Symbian, if you can consider it an option): It’s called Android and, regardless of what iTards will tell you, it’s where the party’s at. I mulled over a Nexus One for a little while, but my car’s transmission made that decision for me and I suppose US$530 really is too much to lay down for a cellphone.
In the end, after much comparing and review trolling, I trucked over to the mall one bored Saturday afternoon and picked up a Sony Xperia X10; the black one, not the sissy white.
The New Hotness
By now some of you have either remembered or Googled the X10 and I’m sure you come up with the same grievances I found, so I’d like to take a couple seconds to shut you up.
The call quality sucks
Well duh, it’s a modern cell phone, what do you expect? As phones gain more pixels and memory and bells and whistles they seem to become less and less capable of actually telephoning. I do have a certain minimum quality level (comparable to a Motorola StarTAC in analog mode) beyond which it’s a deal breaker, but I’ve come to realize that we’ll probably never again see a phone offering call quality on the same level as the 6310i or (surprisingly) Motorola V66i.
After 3 days (I tend not to draw conclusions before then as it’s more than long enough for the honeymoon effect to wear off), the only complaint I have about the X10 is that even with the volume cranked, it’s still quiet. From a quality standpoint, I’ve talked to the old man and the girl for about half an hour cumulatively and it’s well within what’s acceptable these days. Not better, but definitely not worse.
It only runs Donut
In case you’ve been asleep, Donut refers to Android 1.6. Although they’ve just released 2.2 (“Froyo”), Sony-Ericsson is promising an update to Eclair (2.1) in Q4 of this year (around November/Decemberish as near as I can decipher) and given the fact Froyo is only 11 days old, I’m hardly miffed about that.
In Sony’s defense (words I never thought I’d say), their UXP skin and its cornerstone application Timescape would probably need updating so it’s hard to fault them, but that will change rapidly unless a 2.2 update follows shortly thereafter. At the end of the day, some might say the Donut’s getting stale, but they’ve done an amazing job with it and put forth a very well polished, consistent and enjoyable user experience.
It doesn’t shoot HD
True at the moment, but the update I mentioned in the paragraph above is purported to give it video capabilities similar to the Vivaz (their current similar-ish Symbian offering), which I interpret to mean it’ll shoot what passes for 720p these days. I say “what passes” not for lack of resolution, but video streams from most non-camera devices I’ve seen tend to devolve into barely intelligible collections of artifacts with any level of motion.
That being said, I set my X10’s video camera to some weird thing called WVGA (800x480 square pixel) and it produces perfectly acceptable results. Quick motion will result in some temporary artifacting, but for that to be sustained you have to be just this side of silly buggers.
It’s big
Why thank you, but let’s keep this about the phone.
I’m a big guy: Between 6’ 2” and 6’ 4” depending on how badly I’m slouching that day and, with fingers like sausages and hands the size of pie plates, it’s 4.7”x2.5”x0.5” feels perfectly acceptable to me. You also have to remember this thing has a 4” screen on it so this ain’t your designer’s iPhone.
And the verdict is...
Huzzah. I never thought I'd say that because I really hadn't seen anything interesting come from the mashup that is Sony Ericsson since the T68i burst onto the scene in 2002 with its colour screen and camera attachment. In fact, after 3 days of heavy usage, I can honestly say my only real complaint about the phone is that Timescape application. I'm hoping it's just first-version suckiness because, although it allows cool things like seeing Twitter and Facebook updates right from your contact's phonebook entry and the 3d card interface is pretty cool, read-only social media clients are kind of useless. I can to to mobile.twitter.com myself, thanks.
Some people have said it's prettiness makes it slow, but I have yet to find the 1ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon lacking and, while the soft keyboard does take some getting used to, that should happen very quickly. I stil have a couple problems hitting various keys and sometimes miss the auto-completion targets but that can be attributed to the aforementioned largesse of my digits and the fact I tried shortening my thumb a few millimeters with one of those sharpest knife in the world things while at the cottage.
All in all, I'd have to say I haven't once doubted the $150 + fees this thing cost me and I look forward to playing around with it more as I find the time. And one more thing, don't worry, folks, the Rogers salesperson isn't lieing to you: Although most online reviews say the X10 comes with an 8gb MicroSD card, mine was actually 16gb.
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