Yendo Hands on Video & Live pictures

Mittwoch, 16. Juni 2010 um 10:00 Uhr | Geschrieben von: rog

The buzz has been about Android at Sony Ericsson's for the last couple of weeks. Today, Yendo joins the successful Walkman line - find out why there is still some Android flavor in the game :-)

Spiro and Zylo were the last Walkman phones announced by SE back in April this year. The Yendo wouldn't be too spectacular - if there wouldn't be the fact that it brings a whole new User Interface to the Walkman series. If you are familiar with the UI of the Xperia X10 mini (pro), you will immediately recognize the look & feel. There is just a little difference - the Yendo is not running Android, but Sony Ericsson's proprietary operating system.

Main features

Screen: 2.6 inches (320 x 240 px resolution), capacitive
Size: 93.5 x 52 x 15.8 mm
Weight: 81 grams
Operating system: Sony Ericsson Proprietary
Camera: 2MP
Bluetooth™ stereo (A2DP)
3.5mm Headphone Jack

Details

At the first (and actually also on the second) look, the Yendo really looks exactly like the X10 mini user interface. Sony Ericsson did a very good job at porting that look & feel to its proprietary operating system. It looks like this is the first step towards bringing the UX platform (User eXperience) to non-Android phones, just as announced by Sony Ericsson back in November 2009.

Other than that, the features of Yendo are pretty standard for the device class. What one has to get used to (in other words: what one might be missing) is the lack of the usual hardware buttons. The only button on the front serves as back-to-main-menu button (at least this is the behaviour on our prototype, as always things might change until final release).

The Walkman Player, messaging, camera, calendar etc. all are skinned the same way as they are on the Android powered X10 minis, which really leaves the impression of using one of the latter phones.

Our impression

It will be interesting to see where Sony Ericsson will take the UX platform (or at least its look & feel) on other segments of their portfolio. The first step applying it on a Walkman phone definitely looks promising. As you can see on our hands on video, the phone is still a bit laggy, let's hope the final version will be as snappy as the X10 minis are!