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Small, cute, but yet very powerful - that's the just announced Xperia X10 mini. A review with tons of live pictures and an almost 10-minute-video after the break.

With the Xperia X10 not on the market yet, Sony Ericsson today already announced a mini version of the smartphone, the Xperia X10 mini (is anyone else here reminded of Apple's product naming conventions? :-) ). "Smaller brother of the X10" hits the nail on the head perfectly - almost all the features of the X10 can also be found in the tiny version of the smartphone. Let's go into some more details before we head over to some more comprehensive details of this really interesting mobile phone (let's anticipate things a bit here: we are quite excited about that little thing! :) )

• Size: 83x50x16mm, 88 grams
• Display: 2.55 inches, 230 x 320 pixels (QVGA), capacitive & scratch resistant TFT display
• Operating System: Android 1.6
• Processor: 600 MHz Qualcomm MSM7227
• 5 Megapixel camera, VGA video recording & photo/video light
• Internal Memory: up to 128MB, 2GB microSD included, expandable to 16GB
• FM Radio with RDS
• 3.5mm audio jack
• Timescape application
• Predictive text input

Let's have a look at some details of the X10 mini before we go hands-on with our video.

Display size and the consequences

The screen is definitely small compared to other touchscreen smartphones. This generates some challenges in the area of UI design and finger-usability. Sony Ericsson did a great job in this area. The homescreen consists of four configurable icons in the corners that provide fast access to the most common used apps. The remaining space on the screen can be used to add widgets. This concept makes the X10 mini very pleasant to use - everything is within reach of just the thumb! Taking into account that the phone itself is designed to fit very nicely into the palm of an average sized hand makes the phone extremely efficient and easy to use, with just one hand.

Compared to the Xperia X10 (maxi?), the UI has also been optimized for the smaller screen. Buttons are much larger, dropdown list entries have a bigger font size etc. Everything is consequently adopted for thumb-usage. Very well done!

Another area of concern is text input - here, the screen size makes it difficult to provide a full QWERTY on-screen keyboard. Sony Ericsson solved this issue by providing a "virtual" mobile phone keypad. This can be used in a multi-tap mode, or in a word prediction mode (aka T9). The X10 mini makes suggestions and alternative word proposals, which conveniently can be chosen from a drop down list. The language of the text prediction can easily be changed on the fly. In short: Sony Ericsson found a very good trade-off between usability and functionality, in our opinion.

Timescape & Musicplayer

The Timescape-functionality on the mini is identical with the one known from X10 - it provides a single view on calls, Mails, SMS/MMS, Facebook and Twitter messages. It is available as standalone-application, or can be integrated into the homescreen as a widget. Mediascape known from X10 comes in a smaller version on the mini, i.e. there is no separate view on the PlayNow Arena, and the UI is also somewhat simplified. However, PlayNow is integrated into the Infinity-Button which - when pressed - provides additional songs and YouTube search results for the currently playing song or artist. The mediaplayer runs very smoothly already in our prototype-device, as you can see in below hands on video.

Camera

The camera applications has also been undergoing some simplifications - there are again those four corners which provide settings for autofocus mode (Auto, Macro, Twilight, Sports), turning on/off the light, switching between camera and video mode and a link to the camera album viewer. In video mode, there is a switch to change resolution from VGA to MMS optimized video size. Here are a few sample shots in different lighting conditions as well as a sample video:

• Sample picture 1
• Sample picture 2
• Sample picture 3
• Sample picture 4
• Sample picture 5
• Sample picture 6

• Sample video 1 (outdoor) 3GP
• Sample video 2 (indoor) 3GP

 

Performance

Mini device = mini performance? Not at all! The Xperia X10 mini is amazingly fast, already at the current prototype-status! Not much more to say here, just see for yourself in our video. Uh, and did I mention the Neocore result of 38.7 FPS?

OK, now let's go hands on, you can see all the above mentioned topics live on the Xperia X10 mini in our more than 9 minutes hands on video!

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There are three drawbacks in our opinion: first is the not changeable battery, second the lack of an on screen QWERTY-keyboard. The latter might not be a problem for the 1st generation mobile phone users who are used to type on a "real" multitap-keyboard, especially since the predictive text input works really well together with the capacitive touchscreen. And last but not least, there supposedly will be a lot of noise in the SE and Android community on the fact that the phone is supposed to be delivered with Android 1.6 instead of the latest 2.1 version. But there is definitely hope that this will be corrected with a firmware update (before or after launch of the X10 mini)...

Other than that, the X10 mini is a very interesting idea: a powerful, intuitive and versatile mobile phone in a very handy, small form factor, running an easily extendable operating system. Sony Ericsson's next winner? Time will tell - sometime in the 2nd quarter of this year.

To finish this preview off, we leave you with our live picture gallery - enjoy it!

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