The UK Mobile Phone Blog

Sony Ericsson launch the Xperia X2 in style!

November 13, 2009 at 4:12 pm by Dan | In Coming Soon Handsets, Mobile News

Sony Ericsson marked the launch of their latest smartphone, the Xperia X2, with a swanky soiree in the posh Design Museum in an exclusive water front location in South East London. And it wasn’t just the location that provided a touch of class for the evening as Sony Ericsson also convinced Online Entrepreneur Brent Hoberman, co-founder of lastminute.com, to take time out of his busy schedule to help launch Sony Ericsson’s new flagship Windows Mobile phone. Whilst at the launch Hoberman commented: “When travelling for work or pleasure, receiving up to date news, pictures and messages from home is crucial. With a young family and busy career, it’s great never to miss a moment”. But enough about the guests and location, we managed to wade through the canapés and cocktails to get hands-on with the flagship (for now at least) Windows Mobile device.

First impressions are that of a marked improvement over the original Xperia. Build quality for the X2 is top notch with the main body comprised of high quality plastics and a metal battery cover. In keeping with the recent Sony Ericsson trend, the back has a slight accent at the bottom so the phone curves smoothly to fit perfectly in your hand. From holding the phone in your hand you wouldn’t guess it but the X2 also slide out to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard which is, despite its small dimensions, incredibly usable. Think N97 Mini and you’re in the right ball park. From a design point of view the X2 ticks all the right boxes and is in tune with recent Sony Ericsson efforts.

Love it or hate it, the Xperia X2 follows in its predecessors footsteps and runs the Windows Mobile operating system. What we get here is Windows Mobile 6.5 (so slightly more usable than 6.1, but only slightly) buried beneath Sony’s Panel interface. The default panel is that of a 3 windowed home screen, not dis-similar to Android, that is populated by a clock as well as numerous user customised shortcuts. It looks nice and works well but the process of adding and removing new shortcuts could have been made alot easier but the less said about that the better. The X2 also introduces timed panels allowing users to set times in the day for the phone to switch panels automatically. So, for 9 to 5 set a business-centric panel with your email accounts and calender on tap the automatically switch to a more relaxed panel littered with multimedia shortcuts for out of office hours.

Multimedia was also an area Sony Ericsson were keen to push as they see the Xperia X2 as sitting in between a playful iPhone and a more business orientated BlackBerry and with this in mind they’ve loaded the X2 with a beautiful 3.2 inch screen (trust me, the 800 x 480 pixel resolution makes watching movies a joy), 8 Megapixel camera and a 3.5mm headphone jack and microSD support. It would have been nice to see more internal memory and a Xenon flash but when compared to the other Windows Mobile handsets on the market, it’s still an impressive haul.

Without a sim we weren’t able to take the X2 online but even the Sony Ericsson reps were fast to point out that you’re much better off downloading and installing the Opera browser rather than using the inferior, pre-installed Internet Explorer. All in all we were left impressed with the X2. Sony Ericsson have done their best to cover up the well documented flaws of Windows Mobile and the phone looks and feels excellent with a range of top notch features. Expected to launch in the next few weeks, keep an eye on the blog for all the latest info.

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