The Demo Site

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.

What's that, Curvy? I have a Facebook update? No. Is it an instant message? Or what about a phone call? No, not that either. Is someone offering me their "sexxxi pix" on Twitter? Unfortunately not. Perhaps Uncle Wayne has fallen down a mineshaft again? Or has your battery just run out?

First things first. I did not read the manual – frankly, there wasn't one, though that may just have been because the box that I received had already been pilfered - but having used the very easy-to-navigate setup wizard I had the BlackBerry device synced seamlessly with my webmail, so I was not overly concerned. I then slid across to the BlackBerry Apps store – which for some unknown reason is not on the home screen collection of six icons but buried in the BlackBerry menu underneath it – and downloaded a few applications. Well, whoever had the handset before me had already stuck TwitterBerry and Facebook on it and I just added a few free news apps, but downloading them is a doddle, even though the device lacks 3G connectivity. Having been scared out of my skin on numerous occasions by unfamiliar handsets suddenly ringing at me with ear-splitting force, I then switched the whole thing to silent via the profiles icon. I logged into a few of the apps and got sidetracked by my emails.

Then the buzzing started. Ah-ha, it will have alerted me to something. But there is no big friendly message on the home screen telling me why it wanted my attention. Then it went off again. Still nothing. But wait – what's this at the top of the screen? Squinting closely, there is a little email icon with a number next to it. Oh, and a Facebook icon with the number 2 next to it. And a weird clock thing. Hunting around the BlackBerry's menus (and trust me, there are a lot of them: every application has its own menus – just click the Blackberry icon or the trackpad; and different bits of the same application have different menus) I discovered that its default setting is to alert you to absolutely everything. The email icon is easy enough to understand, but what two things I had from Facebook I never did find out, despite numerous visits to the application. In desperation, I ended up pawing at the little icons, wishing it had a touchscreen, like a drunken late-night shopper at Tesco who has opted for the self-service checkout rather than face slurring at a human being. I kept expecting the device to shout "unidentified moron in the graphical user interface".