[white007]

After countless fans waiting for a long time, Sony Ericsson finally introduced its first android smartphone – Sony Xperia X10. It is said that the Xperia X10 is perhaps the most promising of Sony Ericsson's confusing crop of modern smartphones, combining attractive hardware with killer specs, Android, and an intriguing custom skin. Does it hold its own against modern competitors like iPhone which most people like? And more importantly, can it keep Sony Ericsson from going over the brink? Read on to find out.

Design
The XPERIA X10 measures 119*63*13 mm and weight 135 gm and capable of displaying movies and photos in 262k colors on its high 854*480 resolution 4-inch screen.
While iPhone measures 115.5*62.1*12.3 mm and weight 135gm in16 million colors on 480*320 pixel resolution and 3.5-inch screen.
Conclusion: There is not much difference between the form factor of the two smartphones except for the fact that Xperia X10 is slightly, but unnoticeably, bigger.
OS
Xperia X10 runs on Google Android 1.6 OS while iPhone runs on the proprietary iPhone OS 3.1x.
Connectivity and wireless
Both the phones are quadband and GSM-based. Both the phones boast of 3G, WiFi, EDGE, GPRS and Bluetooth (with A2DP) and both lack infrared port.
Browser
Both have ability to optimize web pages to fit the screen and zooming in and out of web pages is a breeze. Both are also slick in checking for or doing stuff. However, unlike Xperia X10 has a Webkit web browser, iPhone comes with Safari browser which doesn't support Flash.
Storage and Memory:
Xperia X10 has 1GB onboard flash memory and microSD card slot (capable of holding up to 16GB, Xperia X10 also ships with 8GB miroSD card). On the other hand, iPhone comes with 256MB onboard flash memory and a choice of 16GB or 32GB internal storage.
Camera and video recording:
Xperia X10 boasts of a whopping 8-megapixel camera with up to 16x digital zoom, image and video stabiliser, auto-focus, touch to focus, face and smile detection, geo-tagging, LED flash and WVGA video recording (@30fps).
On the other hand, iPhone has a 3.15-megapixel camera with auto-focus, tap to focus, VGA video recording (@30fps) and geo-tagging.
Music and Video Player:
Both the smartphones support multiple audio and video playback formats. The Experia X10’s audio player offers a great number of options for filtering content and accessing additional information (via the Infinity button), but lacks equalizer. And it only supports MP3 and AAC formats. While its’ video player recognizes MPEG4 videos coded in H.264 only and does not support DivX and Xvid, which is a shame really, since the huge screen is extremely suitable for watching videos. Another, iPhone supports audio formats: AAC, MP3, WAV and video formats: MP4, H.264 and MPEG-4. Both don’t support all of video formats.
Power and Battery:
Xperia X10 is equipped with a Li-Po 1500mAh battery that should be able to provide 8 hours of continuous talk time and keep the handset operational for 425 hours in stand-by on 3G networks. While iPhone has a built-in Li-Ion battery that ups to 10hours for talk time and 6 hours on Internet use.
Others:
Xperia X10 and iPhone have some common features such as accelerometer, Push email, Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, GPS, SMS, MMS, 3.5mm audio jack, Digital Compass, Google Maps and 3D games.
With Xperia X10, you have access to Android Market and PlayNow arena from where you can download apps, movies, video podcasts, TV shows, music tracks, games etc. It also promises an intuitive UI by introducing signature social media applications like Mediascape and Timescape and also has web feeds, speakerphone, gesture control, flight mode, world clock, and pre-installed useful apps.
On the other hand, iPhone has many cool features including a landscape keyboard for all core apps; an innovative and useful implementation of cut, copy, and paste; push notifications, an improved call log that shows details like the time and length of a call; a spotlight search for searching apps, e-mail, music, and more. It also offers a very useful service called MobileMe, a feature that allows you to remotely track the location of the phone when it goes missing, backup data, wipe data from a lost or stolen phone and restore it in a new one.
Conclusion:
As you can clearly see from the comparison chart above, it really drills down to what the end-user wants from his or her phone. If you want a phone with high quality camera, then Xperia X10 is the answer since it boasts of 8.1 megapixels autofocus camera. On the other hand, one clear advantage that iPhone has over Xperia X10 is its huge number of apps offering, which is a big attraction for most users. But when it comes to sheer hardware power, Xperia X10 comes out as a clear winner. So it really comes down to what you want from your phone and which platform are you more comfortable with.

[DBMandrake]

Can't help responding to a few of the errors and/or misconceptions in this article...

1) First I presume that it was actually an iPhone 3GS that was compared, (based on the auto-focus camera) not an iPhone 3G ? Big difference between the two models especially performance, so it needs to be very clear which model is being reviewed.

2) The iPhone screen is not 16 million colours, but a 262k colour TN LED backlit LCD, with software dithering to simulate 16 million colours. No LCD based phone that I'm aware of is a true 16 million colour screen, as that would require something like an 8 bit S-IPS screen. (I have a suspicion that now that the iPad is out with an 8 bit S-IPS screen, we might see the next iPhone use the same screen technology, for better colour rendition and wider viewing angle...)

3) You say the Sony has a "Webkit web browser" whereas the iPhone has Safari. Webkit is the rendering engine behind Safari - Safari IS a webkit based browser, and Apple is the key contributor to the Webkit open source browser engine which is now used on many different mobile phones. Apart from lack of Flash, the web page rendering of the two will be near identical.

4) You state the iPhone has "256MB onboard flash memory and a choice of 16GB or 32GB internal storage". This is incorrect. The iPhone 3GS has 16GB or 32GB of onboard flash memory, period. The storage is shared between the OS (stored on an approx 500MB filesystem partition) and the 3rd party application and media files, which can use the remainder of of the storage. Unlike all current Android phones, the iPhone can use the entire free storage area (up to approx 30GB) for applications, whereas Android can only store applications on the built in flash memory. (1GB on the Sony, with probably approx half free for applications) The iPhone has 256MB of system RAM for the processor, which is where the confusion about Flash ram may come from.

5) You state that the Sony "boasts of a whopping 8-megapixel camera with up to 16x digital zoom". While this may be factually correct, and I'm sure the camera is somewhat better than the one in the iPhone 3GS, it should be pointed out that 8 megapixel on a phone that has a camera lens the diameter of a grain of rice is not going to give pictures that are any better than the same size lens with a 3-5 megapixel sensor, because the lens is the limiting factor, and limits effective resolution to around 5 megapixel max - further increases although impressive sounding on paper, simply waste file storage with larger files, and such a small high resolution sensor typically has worse low light level performance - so for any picture in dark conditions where the subject is out of range of a weak LED flash, you're going to be better off with the lower megapixel camera in the iPhone. (Or a real camera with a large lens and sensor chip) Digital zoom, unlike optical zoom simply crops the outside of the image off thus lowering the image resolution, and combined the very small lens makes digital zoom in this sort of application pointless.

The whole article seems like a checkbox feature comparison and not an actual side by side review to me...

[hecatae]

i thought the entire review was a promotion for Nidesoft

[Hands0n]

LOL @ Nidesoft. It probably was a bit of self-promotion there.

I actually had the opportunity to play around with an SE X10 at the weekend. It certainly is an interesting device, but one that will ultimately prove to be a bit of a disappointment, in my opinion. I'll just cast a few brickbats in SE's direction based on my observations of the device over a 15 minute period of using it.

Construction
The first thing that hits home is that the SE X10 is entirely plastic, and it feels it too. I wouldn't give that screen too long in the Mrs handbag, it may be glass but it really doesn't feel like it, more like toughened plastic. The casing creaks as you handle it - not boding well for longevity I suspect.

The shape of the X10 is completely rectangular and feels like you're holding a block of plastic in your hand. Actually, that is just what you are holding, and it feels uncomfortable. The front and rear surfaces are slightly convex adding some bloat to the shape, but this does nothing to make the X10 feel nice to hold.

Buttons
The familiar Android buttons are ... well completely unfamiliar. SE have, in their usual wisdom, decided to do random stuff with these, even the button icons make no sense. Some experimentation revealed what each button did, but why did SE do this? Re-invention is a curse and is to be despised.

Weight
Bugger me, this is one heavy muvva. Probably, the likes of Miffed will be able to lift it off the table top or out of the pocket but your average mortal or girlie is unlikely to do so with ease. I nearly had to use both arms to lift the thing off the table - which kind of explained the grin of the P4U salesman (my eldest) as he handed it over to me.

Rachael
SE have overlaid the familiar Android UI with one of their own - more despicable reinvention - and they've made a right botch of it. You know, I can pretty much forgive HTC for their Hero UI, it is damned good. But Rachael on the SE is an abortion of a UI that completely lacks any intuition and is unnecessarily vague. I hated it at sight, and even more once I used it a few times.

Conclusion
You may have gathered by now that I am not particularly enamoured of the Sony Ericsson X10. I am not. I do not like it and certainly would recommend to anyone thinking of having one that they visit a store to check one out in the flesh, so to speak. Do not buy one simply on the specs and glossy pictures being published everywhere.

[Ben]

A bit? Pure spam :)

[DBMandrake]

A bit? Pure spam :)
Good point, I was so wrapped up in responding to the technical errors that I overlooked the fact that it was probably a bogus review to link to their product page ;)

[Ben]

Loving your work, though, DBMandrake! So much so that it'll remain in its cleaned-up state; Hands0n and yourself have transformed the thread into one that suitably fits its title.