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Next thing: let's have a look at the newly introduced concept of Timescape™ and Mediascape™, which basically represents Sony Ericsson's customization of the Android UI. It is pretty common practice to do so, other manufacturers do the same with their Android powered phones.

Timescape™ is - in short - a way of displaying a variety of interactions with traditional and social networks, ordered chronologically on a timeline. It includes events of the following categories:

• Incoming SMS/MMS
• Incoming mails
• Incoming calls
• Twitter Tweets of people you are subscribed to
• Facebook wall posts of your facebook account
• Camera pictures taken

So, whenever there is something new happening in one of above services, you get an entry in the Timescape™ screen. Of course, it can be configured which of those services should appear in Timescape™. Especially if you are engaged into very active social networks, it might be too much information at a time and decrease the overview rather than increase it.

As you can see in below video, there is always a button on every tile that looks like the infinity-symbol: ∞. Sony Ericsson calls this the "Infinite"-button. Its function: provide as much information as possible that is in connection with the person/service in which context the button has been pressed. Sounds confusing? Well, it is in the beginning :-) Let's point out some examples:

• You get an SMS. The sender is in your phonebook, and you have linked that contact with the corresponding Facebook account, Twitter account and maybe one or two mail addresses. In addition, you have some pictures in your photo library, which X10's face recognition has tagged as our sample contact. Pressing the Infinite-button shows now an overview of all the interactions (Calls, Mail, SMS, Facebook, Twitter) with that person, as well as all the pictures on which that person appears.
• You are listening to music of a specific artist. Touch the Infinite-Button, and the X10 shows you YouTube videos, other sound files on the X10 or even a selection of songs from that artists available for purchase from the PlayNow arena!

Enough talking now, let's see Timescape (and Mediascape, a few words on that one after the video) in action:

As you can see in above video, Mediascape consists of three areas: Music, Photos and Videos. The music part features an overview where the upper part of the screen represents the music that is already available on the XPERIA X10 ('My Music'). The lower part shows a selection of recommended and new tracks from Sony Ericsson's music platform, the PlayNow arena. For those who don't like to get purchase proposals, the PlayNow-arena can be switched off, so that the phone shows local contenct only.

The video section features a video player that shows videos stored on the phone. It is capable of playing videos in landscape and portrait format. Not much more to say - other than that the videos look gorgeous on the large 4'' screen!

The photo part provides an overview on all available pictures on the phone on one hand, on the other hand it includes photo albums from Picasa, Flickr and Facebook. The precondition for the availability of the online services is obviously that those accounts are configured in advance. The picture viewer itself is pretty straight forward: zooming, adding the picture to a contact, a share option (MMS, Mail, Gmail, Facebook, Picasa, Bluetooth) and the possiblity to tag a face in a picture, or to change the name of the person in case the X10 was unable to assign the correct contact.

Since Android is a new platform to Sony Ericsson phones, the camera application also got a little makeover. Certainly the biggest news in this area is the face recognition - probably a direct benefit of X10's very fast 1GHz processor, since face recognition technology requires some processing power. Other novelties in the camera area are the multi-point focus and the touch recording for videos. Also nice: the last 5 videos/pictures taken are shown in a small strip at the bottom of the camera, for fast access to sharing or deleting the pictures just taken.

The camera shoots pictures in the following resolutions: 8MP (4:3), 6MP (16:9), 2MP (4:3) and 2MP (16:9)

Videos can be captured in WVGA, VGA, QVGA and optimized for MMS and the online video services YouTube, Flick and Picasa.

Here you can see the XPERIA X10 camera in action:

A couple of sample pictures and a short sample video here (as always with our previews, keep in mind: pre-production hardware and software!) Click on the pictures to open the original file.

Sample video (2.8MB, MP4 encoded)

See more of the X10 in action on the next page!