The Demo Site

It has been nearly a year since Sony Ericsson announced its Xperia X1 smart phone. And the time it took to bring this device to market has not dampened our appreciation for its premium arc slider design, refreshing panel interface, and fast data performance (over 3G and Wi-Fi). Despite some drawbacks, we wish this was the phone AT&T and Sprint chose to launch instead of the HTC Touch Pro. However, because the X1 is not backed by a U.S. carrier, this unlocked device is entirely too expensive for the masses. Plus, its overall performance isn’t quite snappy.

Design
Touching the Xperia X1 for the first time is somewhat like sitting down in a 7 Series BMW. It looks luxurious and feels expertly crafted. At 4.4 x 2.1 x 0.7 inches, it’s longer and a hair wider than the HTC Touch Pro, but just as thick.

The silver brushed-metal exterior is home to a few controls, including call and end buttons, two metal soft menu keys, an X Panel button, OK key, and an optical mouse that doubles as an omnidirectional button; these keys are triangular and a glossy black plastic. A stylus stores in the lower left corner. The large 3-inch, 800 x 480 display is skinny but crisp and colorful, although overly reflective.

The sides of the device are accented by a chrome silver strip, along which you’ll find a mini-USB charging port, a power button, a full 3.5mm headphone jack, volume controls, and a camera quick-launch key. Two small lights illuminate to alert you of a phone call, new messages, and more. The rear of the X1 looks industrial. Also made of brushed metal, it has plenty of ridges and angles that add to its beauty. This is also where the 3.2-MP camera and single LED flash reside. The microSD slot is under the battery, so you’ll have to open the casing to insert a microSD Card.

Keyboard and Optical Mouse

A full QWERTY keyboard slides smoothly from underneath the phone at a slight angle for comfortable typing. The plastic beveled keys look and feel like metal, and the letters are backlit with a white glow under dark conditions. We had no problems entering short Web addresses on the keyboard, but longer text or e-mail messages felt tedious to type; the keys are just barely raised above the surface of the keyboard, so they’re lacking tactile feedback when they’re pressed. We got used to it over time, but the BlackBerry Curve and Bold offer a better layout.

The optical mouse can take some getting used to. Unlike the Samsung Epix or Omnia, which feature a similar button, it doesn’t provide an on-screen cursor. So moving around menus can be difficult without knowing exactly what you’re selecting. After we changed the settings to a more comfortable sensitivity, we were able to navigate the phone more easily.

User Interface
The X1’s claim to fame is its X Panel user interface. You can quickly launch this menu system by pressing the X Panel button on the phone’s face. When it’s open, you can view 9 different panels that act as shortcut portals into applications such as Google search, FM radio, your calendar, the home screen, your media player, and more. Seven apps come preinstalled. Sony Ericsson released its X Panel software-development kit in September, but only five additional panel downloads are available, including a photo viewer and Dashwire. We hope to see more third-party panels soon.

The X Panel UI can be viewed in two different modes: either as small snapshots in three rows of three, or in a layout that looks like a spread of playing cards. When you flip the phone into landscape mode, its accelerometer rotates the panels to fit. The X1’s 528-MHz processor struggled to keep up, though, and the lack of a separate graphics accelerator was noticeable; panels shifted and rotated very slowly.

On most Windows Mobile phones, you can simply hit the End button a few times and be back to the main Today screen. With the Xperia X1, that doesn’t happen. Instead, if you close out of something, you’re brought back to the last panel you had open in X Panel. To get to the home screen again, you’ll need to select Today from the start menu or from that UI overlay, which we found annoying.