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SINGAPORE : At a time when most smartphone manufacturers are making their screens bigger, it's rare to see one with a display that's a mere 2.55 inches. And this is how Sony Ericsson's Xperia X10 mini pro (S$588 without contract) goes against the grain - it's smaller than a credit card, at 90x52mm.
While its size makes it fetching to some, its thickness (17mm) reduces its attractiveness somewhat. However, the convenience offered by the slide-out Qwerty keyboard, which has well-spaced keys and a nice feel, makes its less-than-slim profile forgivable.
Sony Ericsson has customised the user interface of the Android operating system, adding features such as four customisable shortcuts on the corners of each home screen, as well as a social app called Timescape.
Timescape compiles the SMSes and missed calls from your contacts in the phone as well as status updates from your Facebook and Twitter friends, and presents them in a stream of thumbnails for you to flick through.
While Timescape offers a neat way of keeping up with your friends' lives on the go, its rather cumbersome method of truncating the longer status updates and directing you to the Facebook or Twitter webpage to read them in full is disappointing.
You also have to reply through these webpages: Timescape only allows you to update your own status.
There is an "infinite" button in the music player that searches YouTube for the name of the artiste and lists all the videos it finds - a nice touch. I also like that you can quickly and reliably disable the data connection from the notification bar or a home screen widget.
The performance of the handset's 600MHz Qualcomm processor is faster than expected, but lags a little sometimes, for example, when loading messages and photos.
One grouse I have about the mini pro is that it cannot send or receive files via Bluetooth unless you install an app to do so.
The phone comes with an 8GB microSD card (its slot supports up to 16GB). It runs on Android 1.6, but Sony Ericsson will roll out upgrades for the OS to version 2.1 from the third quarter onwards.
With the music player, push mail, WiFi and Bluetooth on, and Timescape updating itself every hour, the battery lasts for about 12 hours. With less intensive use (Bluetooth off and music playing intermittently), it lasts for about 14 hours.
The Xperia X10 mini pro's small size is a double-edged sword - being tiny distinguishes it from the crowd and makes for convenient one-handed operation, but that also gives it all the disadvantages of a downsized screen. This includes an inferior video-watching and web-surfing experience.
- TODAY/il
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