Sony-Ericsson announce XPERIA X1 a GPS Windows Mobile phone

MikeB

Sony-Ericsson have moved away from the propriety phone operating system and have entered the World of Windows Mobile. The XPERIA X1 was announced on the eve of the Mobile World Congress and represents a significant move into the WM space enabling the quick and easy deployment of many LBS and Navigation solutions available on the WM platform.

mikealder · Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 7:51 pm Post subject:

MikeB, I have looked at the blog, this looks like a killer device, the VGA screen and HSDPA coupled with GPS is everything the HTC Polaris was rumoured to have a while back (but never delivered due to the QVGA display) - possibly the ultimate convergence device?

I would like to see more of this "toy" before deciding if its for me as an Artemis replacement - any chance of some pictures or have I missed the boat?
Also when is this expected to hit the shops in the UK - MikeAlder

MikeB · Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 1:40 am Post subject:

I managed to muscle my way through the crowds this afternoon and grab some pictures of the device... There was only 1 working version on the stand and the poor guy was swamped.

The pics are not very good, but give an idea of the size of the device. I will post them tomorrow (actually it is later today) in the Event Blog.

From what I saw there is an interesting home/today page, with 9 sectioned application pages. These can be arranged in a grid or a fan. Now didnt I see that on my MacOS 10.5??
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Mike Barrett

MikeB · Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 2:16 pm Post subject:

Ok the pictures are there now. Only two came out and they were not wonderful Sad

Click here
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Mike Barrett

MaFt · Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 4:23 pm Post subject:

mikealder · Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2008 4:53 pm Post subject:

It would appear this is a HTC manufactured device probably badged by SE running WM6,5 from what I have been reading on the net, did the staff of the stand mention anything about this? - Mike

MikeB · Posted: Sat Feb 16, 2008 1:34 am Post subject:

pko · Posted: Fri Feb 22, 2008 3:45 pm Post subject: Xperia

to Mikb, obviously I'm not holding you to anything, but with your experience together with the spec. SE have released, do you think it would accept & run Memory Map providing it had a large enough memory card?
many thanks pko

MikeB · Posted: Fri Feb 22, 2008 5:11 pm Post subject:

Well I dont think I would be sticking my neck out too far saying that it will almost certainly run Memory-Map. A lot of lesser specified devices run it OK so there is no reason to suspect the SE wont run it.

One of the questions to bear in mind will be the battery life. On my O2 orbit it is quite good though. Comparable to a dedicated PDA.
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Mike Barrett

sausages · Lifetime Member Joined: Feb 25, 2005 Posts: 62

erm, the Xperia isn't 'new' per se.

I spotted it in its current form at the end of January. The only differences between it and the kaiser was the then announced 400mb internal storage and the extremely useful USB Mass Storage facility. Apart from that there's not that much difference.

The kaiser/Vario III has serious issues with its video drivers. Touch applications run on the kaiser but there are a number of fixes, cabs and applications from other HTC devices which bring the Kaiser up to a functionality level comparable to the Xperia though I suspect not as fast or as smooth as the Xperia.

My Kaiser runs Memory Map and I have the entire 1:50k map set on a 6GB micro SD card and have done for a long time. I have a selection of the 1:25k maps and it all woks seamlessly, picking up a (hot) feed from the GPS chip in about 4 seconds. Memory Map worked on the MDA Compact and its predecessors including old school Pocket PCs about 500 years ago, so I'm pretty sure the Xperia will run it.

The 3G HSDPA on the Kaiser is OK and no more. The actual throughput is good but there's a lot of lag and the latency is a bit shoddy. That's when you can get a 3G signal. TomTom traffic hangs when it can't find a signal but it does come back of its own accord eventually. I suspect the Xperia will be the same.

I've been using these sort of devices since early pocket PCs and the Kaiser is the first truly converged device but if you don't know what you are doing with them they could well prove an expensive and frustrating nightmare. You really do have to tweak the bejesus out of them to get them to do what they are capable of.

mikealder · Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2008 8:36 am Post subject:

But the Kaiser/ Vario III uses QVGA screen size, which considering its poor graphics driver is probably a good thing. The new unit is VGA, that is four times as many pixels to make up the screen image so they will have had to alter the graphics hardware in a big way - Mike

sausages · Lifetime Member Joined: Feb 25, 2005 Posts: 62

mikealder · Posted: Sun Mar 23, 2008 10:21 am Post subject:

Here is some additional information on this device:

This device isn’t VGA it is actually WVGA sporting 800x480 pixels with 16 bit colour it has a 3” wide TFT screen. The battery is only 1500mAh so it will be interesting to see how this lasts in heavy usage with a large screen and the associated power needed to drive it. The spec does mention hardware 3D support, but only in the introduction and some sort of demo mode involving a fish tank.

For communication you get full a full Quad band phone which drops to Tri-Band for the UMTS connection, speeds quoted are HSDPA 7,2Mbps and HSUPA 2,0Mbps obviously these figures will be under ideal conditions seldom in use will you actually achieve this full data transfer.

Built in memory is available and up to 400MB of it is installed, if you need more than this a micro SD card slot is provided which supports SDHC, it doesn’t state where this actually is on the phone. From one of the pictures it appears to be on the side of the phone, I hope so as the “lets hide it under the battery” seen on a number of other devices was a very poor idea.

There is an FM radio built into the device which (no surprises here) uses the headphones as the aerial, what does seem strange though is the 3,5MM audio jack the headphones employ. This makes we wonder if it is a HTC device at all, HTC have been using the 11 pin mini USB connector for headphone connectivity for quite some time.

The camera technology employed on the Experia comprise of two cameras the main rear one is equipped with an LED flash and sports up to 3,2 Mega Pixel resolution, an interesting concept will be the “Touch Focus” system it uses. A front mounted camera is provided for video calls. The main camera also supports video recording, European phones will be capable of shooting at VGA resolution (640x480) at up to 30fps, strangely the US spec version only gets video recording at QVGA (320x240) at up to 24fps

The languages supported are World Wide English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Finnish, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, it will be interesting to see where this unit is released first out of that lot though.

Very little is said about the aGPS other than “Several 3rd party applications can be used for location based services and Navigation”, Google maps are pre-installed to the unit. My only real concern with 3rd party applications on this unit will be screen compatibility, the 800x480 resolution is not common place in the word of PDA’s (yet) so pko you should be able to load MM on the device as it is WM6 but whether MM supports WVGA is an unknown at the moment.

Bluetooth is unsurprisingly version 2 owners of the TomTom PNA devices will have some fun though getting it to work for a data connection, it lacks the necessary DUN profile.
It does support the following though:

If you want to read the entire white paper go to This Page, enter the silly four characters in the check box and it will download the 39 page pdf document - Mike

sausages · Lifetime Member Joined: Feb 25, 2005 Posts: 62

Thanks, will give it a read.

Looks tempting and I like the 3.5mm jack idea.

pko · Posted: Sun Mar 23, 2008 1:04 pm Post subject:

thanks Mikealder, very interesting. I'll see what I can find from MM.
kind regards
pko

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