The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 came and left our labs a few months ago failing to win our hearts. It was a decent phone, but a couple of flaws couldn't be overlooked. Plus, now with quality competition the game has become even tougher. For those who feel the X10 felt like a slab in the pocket, Sony Ericsson offers you variety with the X10 Mini.
When I first set eye on this phone, I exclaimed "Oh my god, they really meant it by calling it the Mini!". This cute little phone has the internals of an HTC Legend with certain compromises that allowed SE to cram it into a shell this small. So is this a classic case of form over function? Or has Sony Ericsson managed to maintain a fine balance. Read on to uncover the truth.
Design and Build
The big brother X10 was quite a handful with that humongous 4-inch screen. The X10 Mini on the other hand is really tiny in comparison. It reminded me of that tiny Bipasha Basu branded Panasonic A100 from ancient times. The phone easily fits in the palm, and the pointy edges of the X10 have been curved off in the X10 Mini, providing a better feel. At under 90 grams, the phone packs in so much inside as is still quite light. The build quality is pretty good. With limited space to play with, SE withdrew the privilege of a removable battery in the X10 Mini; just like the iPhone. As a consolation, you can change the back cover and you get a variety of colors to choose from. They've even thrown in a few in the package itself, so you can start matching the phone to your daily apparel from day one.
The screen is much smaller at 2.55 inches, which is even smaller than your typical 2.8-inch Samsung Corby. Fortunately, being of capacitive nature, the finger response is pretty good. The swift UI also deserves appreciation, but more on that later. My initial skepticism about usability of a touchscreen this small was completely washed away. But it sports a QVGA (320 x 240 pixel) resolution which in comparison to today's HVGA (320 x 480) phones feels pale. It also could be because of the 65K color limitation of Android 1.6 that's making it look that way. The brightness also isn't too satisfying; we preferred keeping it at max. For a touchscreen, the real estate felt a little too small to browse full-fledged websites. But it is fine to act as a viewfinder to the camera at the back. All in all, it's a responsive screen but not as crisp and readable as bigger Android phones.
The front face looks pretty similar to its bigger brother; the menu/home/back buttons below the screen have the same styling. A power-cum-keylock key is placed on top and the volume control/camera shutter buttons lie to the right. A 3.5mm earphone jack and a microUSB port is placed at the bottom. The camera sensor is blessed with a LED flash at the back. One slight niggle was the placement of the earpiece, which is positioned to the left, instead of center. So I had to adjust the position when speaking left-handed. After getting used to holding brick-long devices to the ear, holding the X10 mini to the ear felt a little different. Lastly, there's no front-facing camera, so if you're kicked about making video calls in the future then they wouldn't be possible on this one.
User Interface
Like the XPERIA X10, the X10 Mini also runs the now 'eons-old' Android 1.6. Sony Ericsson has done heavy customizations for the small screen. Instead of app shortcuts on the home-screen, they are placed at four corners of the screen. The menu has multiple pages that can be swiped sideways, like on the iPhone. Let's get to that UI swiftness that I mentioned before.
While we weren't entirely happy with the operating speed of the original X10, I can happily state that the X10 mini's interface is quick and fast. There was hardly a lag anywhere throughout our usage. Maybe the decently-powered 600 MHz processor isn't finding rendering of just 320 x 240 pixels too taxing.
Now, for the bad part; there are times when certain applications portray content, with what I thought to be tiny fonts, that affected readability. I'm not just talking about third party apps, even in Gmail and Gtalk the font size seemed a little too small to my liking. While web-browsing you at least have the option to zoom into text to make the fonts appear bigger. But for Gmail there's no way to increase the font size from the settings menu.
Text entry won't be pleasant if you've gotten used to QWERTY phones. The Mini's screen being to small to fit a full QWERTY in either orientation, you just get an alphanumeric pad in portait mode. It is designed rather well, and has T9 dictionary mode as well as multi-tap entry options. There are many emoticons that one can choose from. But still, chatting on Google Talk or typing long e-mails isn't quite convenient as it would be on other phones that have some form of QWERTY based input.
The basic apps work as usual. Google Maps was spot on during my drives in Mumbai. There's also a turn-by-turn app called Wisepilot installed. But we couldn't test it since it had apparently expired its usage period. The chronological event based app in the X10 called Timescape is also present in the Mini. While we think it looks cool and functional, the design is somewhat of a hindrance. First of all, the messages have the person's image slapped into the box, super-imposed with text in white, which hampers readability. Youtube player works well, and videos embedded on a website can also be played in the browser.
The 'Album' app shows tiled previews in a simplistic format, and flipping through photos is an ease. Despite the lack of pinch-zoom, it is fairly simple to just press-and-hold to zoom into a picture. The music player is very basic, it doesn't even have categorization according to artists, albums, genre, which kinda put us off. You can choose songs alphabetically or play them in shuffle. There are no EQ settings either.
Web-browsing was a so-so affair, presumably due to the small screen. Pages rendered fairly fast and scrolling through them was pretty smooth. But the rendering of fonts on screen made me zoom a lot for the content to be readable. As text size gets bigger, you'll have to constantly keep scrolling if you're reading through a long page. All in all, the web browsing experience was mediocre due to the screen.
Lastly, this is still Android 1.6, a few generation old OS which none of the newer Android releases sport. As I've mentioned in detail in another article, other than missing features like Flash support and multi-touch, some of the newer apps work on Android 2.1 and above. If that wasn't enough, the QVGA resolution could serve as another hindrance to use apps that weren't designed to work with this resolution. Let's just hope Sony Ericsson updates the OS soon and apps start supporting the QVGA resolution as well.
Like all SE phones, TrackID is pre-installed. This app lets you identify the name and artist of the music being played by simply recording a few seconds of the track, which is then sent to their servers over the internet for analysis. In my usage, it worked pretty well.
Performance
Call quality was pretty good and the ear-piece volume is also pretty loud. The loudspeaker is fairly audible and gives clear output for voice and music. Sony Ericsson phones have been known for their superiority in imaging and audio finesse. They had somewhat lost track in between with providing sub-par earphones with even "Walkman" branded phones. While the camera clarity on some "Cyber-shot" branded phones was nothing to boast of. I'm glad that SE's got hold of that department back!
The 5 megapixel sensor on the X10 mini delivers very good quality snaps. Daylight shots look good on the screen. Night shots are well illuminated, thanks to the tiny but powerful LED flash at the back. The camera interface is quite snappy in operation, which also makes using it a pleasant affair. It doesn't have too many tweaks; just the basics like Auto, Macro mode, Twilight and Sports mode. Videos are also shot at a fairly smooth frame-rate and at VGA resolution.
Audio quality was another striker for the X10 mini. It is ironic of Sony Ericsson to bundle an average pair of ear-phones with the Rs. 30,000 X10, and bundle the nice-sounding in-ear style ones with the X10 mini, which is half its cost. They have decent bass response and are good enough to make you not replace them with a better pair. In case you want to use better earphones, the 3.5mm jack allows you to do so. Although the built-in music player app is simplistic, there are better ones available on the Android Market. Thus the X10 mini would serve as a good replacement for a stand-alone MP3 player.
Battery Life
The X10 mini, owing to its petite form, could only hold a comparatively low-power 950 mAh battery. The battery life isn't great; it lasted me for a day with moderate usage. If you're going to use Wi-fi and GPS heavily, then expect even worse. Now, most phones with 3-inch+ touchscreens unfortunately have such battery life. But for a phone sporting a screen as small as the X10's, we'd expect better. Some people like to keep spare batteries that they can swap, but the X10 mini's non-removable nature won't let them do that.
Price and Verdict
The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 Mini sells in the market for Rs. 15,000. It is a pretty likable phone due to its cute size, good audio as well as camera performance and the possibility to expand its functionality with the underlying Android OS. It's a shame that its size also ends up being its downside. Similarly priced phones like the HTC Wildfire have a fairly big 3.2-inch screen that offer better display. In that sense, we feel that paying Rs. 15,000 is a little too much. We feel this suggested pricing would be a fair price-point for the Mini.
If you're going to use its features, for instance - GPS mapping, internet browsing, heavy text input etc. - then you're better off with a screen bigger than the X10 mini's. But if you just want a cute little phone with a good feature-set crammed inside, then the X10 mini is workable choice. But that is, provided your text input is going to be minimal. Otherwise, we'd highly advise spending Rs. 1,500 more and getting the X10 Mini Pro, which is exactly same as this phone but with a landscape slide-out QWERTY keyboard.
