Introduction & Positioning

It is a little early to judge Sony Ericsson’s attempt to reach a larger market by creating smartphones running on different operating systems. However, this approach produced a larger range of devices than Sony Ericsson used to have in the past and has spawned some interesting phones.

No matter how hard I tried, I could not write this article without often referring to the other two X-series devices running Google’s Android OS – X10 and X10 mini, so let me apologise for this from the beginning.

Today I’ll take a look at the “professional” version of the X10 mini. This is one of the two “mini” versions that complete the series along with their big brother – the X10. Hence the name – X10 mini pro, which some may find a little… boring to say frankly. The only notable differences between X10 mini and X10 mini pro are the size and usability of the keyboard. So, let’s begin.

Design, Size & Controls

Sony Ericsson is trying to make the most out of the design used in X10. And when you look at X10 mini pro, you are likely to get mixed impressions. The design itself remains simple and clean, which in some people’s eyes is seen as an advantage, however the appearance of the sliding QWERTY keyboard has altered the device’s size for the worse. Sony Ericsson ended up with a device with small length and width that looks and feels a little…. chubby!

Similarly to X10 and X10 mini, this device has three functional keys on the front panel. Along with the earphone and the ambient light sensor these keys complete the… let’s call it ‘simplistic’ front side.

Power button and a 3.5mm audio jack are placed on the top side the phone. The audio jack is combined with the interface used in Sony Ericsson’s headsets to provide control for the device’s music functions.

The microphone and a loop for the wrist band are located on the bottom side.

On the right side you will find the volume controls and the camera button. Both these buttons are well placed and easy to use. On the left side we see the microUSB slot that is used for both charging the device and connecting it to a computer with the provided cable. However this microUSB slot is poorly placed to say the least. It sticks out from the phone casing and can be felt by your hand when you hold the device, no matter which hand you hold it with.

And lastly, on the back of the device along with Sony Ericsson’s logo and the XPERIA sign, we have the camera, LED flash and the phone’s single speaker.

Display

The phone has a 240×320 pixel TFT capacitive screen. Even though it does have a small diagonal (due to the small size of the phone), its quality is far from perfect and individual pixels are clearly visible. Apart from the resolution, there is another problem caused by the display. And I think that this is the first major disadvantage of the phone. X10 mini pro runs on Android 1.6, which supports only a limited number of colors. Colors look “washed out” and that, combined with a mediocre brightness, makes the screen feel much cheaper than the device’s price and market position suggest.

Keypad

Here is where things turn for the better – this is the Mini Pro’s main advantage over the X10 mini and in some respect even to its big brother X10 itself, since it does not have a keyboard either. With the sliding keyboard closed, when you hold the device in your hand you can’t avoid feeling awkward and trying to see what’s wrong. However, as soon as you slide the keyboard open and hold the phone with both hands you realize the difference. The keyboard itself is slightly small and keys seem squeezed together. Still, both the actual usability and the feeling from using the keyboard are exactly the opposite since it is much easier than some might think to enter text with it and the feedback from pressing the keys is more than just good. It almost gives you the impression of a much more expensive device.

Getting used to the small size of the keyboard will not take more than a couple of days and after that you will find that entering text and using the phone with the keyboard open is more than just another option, it’s more the only logical option for using this device.

Battery

The phone uses BST-38 battery with a nominal capacity of just 970 mAh. However, due to the small screen and impressive work done on power consumption, the battery manages to keep the phone running for a couple of days when you use most of its features and capabilities.

Memory & Memory Cards

X10 Mini Pro comes with a little more than 150 MB of internal memory available to the user, as pre-installed applications take up some space.

The phone supports microSD cards and does have a “hot-swapping” ability since the card is placed under the battery cover but thankfully not under the battery itself.

Connectivity

The device supports all of the ‘usual’ connectivity standards:

Bluetooth. All the profiles needed to use the device in almost every possible mode are supported here, except one. Although their big brother the X10 can send and receive files over Bluetooth, this functionality is not available in X10 Mini Pro and X10 Mini.

Wi-Fi. The module supports b/g networks and manages to connect to them easily and stay connected without problems.

USB. The microUSB slot allows the device to be connected to a computer to transfer files through the mass-storage mode or to be synchronized as a normal Android phone. It supports USB 2.0 and the transfer speeds reach up to 4 Mbp/s, which is quite impressive for a device of this kind.

Camera

The phone comes with a 5 MPx camera which is a bit of a mishmash. Let me explain what I mean.

Most, if not all, Android phones are not even close to capturing more than just decent pictures if that. Sony Ericsson’s phones tend to break this “tradition” and all of the X10 devices produce pictures that on one hand are better than most Android phones, on the other hand though, they lag behind the solutions offered by Sony Ericsson itself in other, even lower price segments.

The camera in X10 Mini Pro produces acceptable, even good pictures in normal daylight, however the same cannot be said for the images taken in low light conditions or even indoors.

The camera interface does its best to keep the “mixed” impression we mentioned above. It makes the most out of the clever user interface that SE created to make this small screen as usable as possible. Four buttons are located in each corner of the screen and each one of them performs one of the most commonly used camera operations. This applies to both the still image and video modes with the options changing accordingly. However (and here is where the strange part begins), if you need to change any other setting related to the camera, there is no way to do that from the camera application itself. You will have to exit the camera mode, go to the phone Settings menu and there choose the Application Settings.

While personally I cannot find a good reason for this kind of split in available settings, I suppose that Sony Ericsson has its reasons.

There is ONLY one available resolution for still images, which I suppose is the maximum one. In video mode you can select the video resolution to be either 640×480 pixels or smaller and adjust the length in order to send the videos via MMS.

Now that I think of it, all of these shortcomings and strange options destroy the impression made by the camera as a whole.

Entertainment & Social Networking

Apart from the camera, the phone offers all the usual entertainment options of music, video and games with the first two offered in a slightly modified Sony Ericsson version in comparison to the original Android one.

And, of course, there is the Timescape interface. This interface is aimed to combine all communication and social networking features in one place.

Let us start with music and video playback features.

The music player is a redesigned version of the MediaScape interface available on X10, which as a whole is not and will not be made available for both of its “smaller” brothers.

The application itself cannot be found anywhere in the phone menu and can only be launched from the corresponding option on the stand-by screen, which some may find a bit awkward.

Describing the music player as poorly designed would honestly be an understatement. Apart from the fast forward, rewind and, of course, the play/pause keys that appear on the screen, there are few other options. There is an option to display a list of all available tracks and another option to categorise tracks using Smart Playlists – just a clever name for Newly Added, Most Played, Never Played and In Alphabetical Order.

There are no Shuffle or Repeat options to be found anywhere and, most importantly, there is no equalizer of any kind available, not even as a separate application as it is in Sony Ericsson’s S60 5th edition based devices.

So… the music must not be an important feature for Sony Ericsson or they think that it’s not a key feature for the potential buyers of the phone. I can only guess about the first part, but as far as the second goes, I am sure that it is far from being true.

After seeing the X10 Mini Pro’s music player or, I suppose, after reading about it, no one would expect anything radically different from the video playback. And rightly so – there are no surprises there. The video player is nothing more than a list of videos available in the phone memory, both internal and external (memory card), since they are displayed together. Upon user selecting a video to play, the phone starts displaying it and offers just a play/pause button and a progress bar under it. There are no controls to move to the next or previous video.

While playing with the TimeScape UI I found that at least this part of the phone is more or less the same as the X10 and provides all of the options available there.

Unfortunately the phone’s small screen size does not make navigation through Timescape an enjoyable experience.

All of the current events are displayed as small windows, compared to the big ones in X10 and most of the key features are available through the four buttons placed on each corner of the screen.

The options are as follows: you can choose which of the available communications, events and social networking features you want to be displayed in the application and you can choose between Facebook and Twitter, messages and missed calls (not received ones though).

The second option gives you access to a list of all the e-mail addresses available on your Google account and the phone’s address book. The third option lets you update your status on Facebook or on Twitter or both and the fourth and the last one is simply an option to manually perform an update of the application’s status.

All of these features or applications (you can call them any way you want) are far from perfect and give you the impression of both a “pared” down version of the applications found on X10.

Using the multimedia features on this device is more work than fun.

Platform & Performance

The phone is built on Qualcomm’s MSM 7227 platform and makes use of all the chipset’s abilities ranging from GPS receiver to the embedded light sensor.

Aided by the screens small resolution and quite good work that Sony Ericsson has done optimizing the OS, the phone is fast, with no noticeable freeze-ups and slowdowns.

However it is a shame that Android 1.6 cannot make use of the chipset’s embedded video decoder and some other features that are used in competing solutions based on the same platform, but running the 2.1 version.

The phone has 128 MB of RAM memory of which almost 50 MB are available to the user to run applications.

Navigation

Since there is a built-in GPS receiver, accompanied by the A-GPS function, the phone is expected to have the ability to find its location and guide you.

Sony Ericsson keeps offering Navipilot as an extra application for navigation. The phone comes with a trial version of the application installed and you will have to pay for it after the trial period is over.

I must say that this option is far from perfect and lags behind the solutions offered by others and especially Nokia’s free to all policy in S60 devices.

All of that along with the phone’s small screen does not make it even a compromise as a navigation solution and probably you will find yourself forgetting about this feature after a couple of weeks.

There is always an option to download special applications from Android Market to make use of GPS for measuring your speed for example, but I highly doubt that this can replace the core functionality of a GPS system as a navigation solution.

Software

While I’ve made some references to the software, let us try to put it all together here.

The phone runs on the Android Operating System, version 1.6.

More than a year ago this version was anticipated by almost everyone and thought to be the best version available. A year has passed and many things have changed. The latest version available at the moment is the 2.2.

Some parts of the 1.6 version were left unfinished by Google, and while some of them can be corrected by a device manufacturer, others cannot. The lack of the necessary Bluetooth profile for File Exchange is the one that could be changed by Sony Ericson, but, unfortunately, it was not.

The limited color palette used by the system cannot be changed or bypassed.

On top of that, some key functions are missing and the number of new applications for this version on the Android Market is decreasing. And this situation is about to get worse since some of the devices that come with version 2.2 are getting very popular and that makes most developers devoting their time and efforts to this version.

I must admit that this situation is mostly Google’s fault and not Sony Ericsson’s. This is because Google releases new versions quite fast, leaving phone manufacturers with a hard decision to either release new devices based on the latest version of the operating system, or to develop an update to the newer version for existing devices, or even both.

In my opinion Sony Ericsson’s fault lies only in the fact that the company does not have the resources to support more than one operating system. And until they are continuing to waste time without deciding which system to support, this situation will continue to exist.

The company is trying to make Timescape and Mediascape run without problems on version 2.1 in order to be able to provide it as an update for the devices that will be released in Q3 or even at the start of Q4 of 2010. This is the time when every other manufacturer will either be updating their devices to version 2.2 or designing and announcing, if not releasing, new devices based on this version.

As it stands today, all three devices from Sony Ericsson based on this OS are lagging behind and the company’s effort to hide this fact behind the heavily advertised Mediascape and Timescape UI is failing in the eyes of the consumers. This holds true for the X10 itself more than fot its two little brothers since it is sold in a higher price bracket, where it has to compete with many other offers by HTC and Samsung in particular . As for the X10 mini and the X10 mini pro, their lower price and their positioning in general makes them look less outdated.

Conclusion

Qualcomm eh… sorry, Sony Ericsson taught us to expect devices with excellent reception, good speech quality and the X10 mini pro is no exception.

The phone vibration function is powerful enough, perhaps a little too powerful and the speaker ringing volume is loud without many distortions.

In general the device manages to leave a positive impression, mostly due to its small size and straightforward design, even though it is not flawless. Based on an outdated version of a popular and pretty stable operating system, it manages to stay afloat, but barely, thanks to some optimisations made by Sony Ericsson that, although not capable to eliminate the shortcomings, made it at least acceptable and more than just usable.

If only it had made it to the market along with its brothers a little sooner the situation would have been radically different and favorable for this device.

Nowadays it is nothing more than an average solution making as much use of some distinct features as possible to justify both its existence and price.

I have my doubts about its success on the market since there are way too many competing solutions and the sliding keyboard by itself cannot differentiate it from most of them.

A simultaneous launch of all the three devices would have saved the situation a little in the way that Sony Ericsson would offer more than one choice to someone willing to stay loyal to this phone manufacturer. Now, most of these people will go for the already available X10 and try to forget it’s disadvantages both in hardware and software, while some of them will naturally and logically choose a phone from either HTC or Samsung if they are Android fans first of all things. This leaves a few potential buyers for the X10 mini and even less for the X10 mini pro.

[images via Sony Ericsson]

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