Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro Preview

Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro Preview
Page content

Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro Preview

Sony Ericsson is rolling out scores of new phones in a bid to capture the maximum Android user base. It has the Xperia X10, the Xperia X8, the Xperia X10 Mini and now the Xperia X10 Mini Pro.

The Xperia X10 Mini was aimed at budget consumers looking for a cheap Android phone which was compact. The Xperia X10 Mini Pro is exactly the same as the Xperia X10 Mini, except for the fact that it has a physical sliding keyboard.

While the Xperia X10 Mini has been received well, there has been one major complaint - the lack of a decent keyboard. As the Xperia X10 Mini had a small display, it couldn’t accommodate even a virtual QWERTY keypad resulting in typing on the small display becoming tedious. The Xperia X10 Mini Pro brings in an excellent physical QWERTY keyboard which is a great option for heavy texters.

Design (3 out of 5)

The Xperia X10 Mini Pro is considerably bulkier than the Xperia X10 Mini on account of the added keypad. Besides that, it has exactly the same stylish design. The build quality is excellent and the phone is small and compact, just a bit thicker. It has dimensions of 90 x 52 x 17 mm and weighs 120 gms - about 35% more than the X10 Mini.

The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro sports the same display as the Xperia X10 Mini. It has a 2.55 inch TFT capacitive touchscreen display with a native resolution of 240 x 320 pixels and supports 16M colors. It is a bit small for video playback, but does well for general usage.

Hardware (3 out of 5)

It sports the exact same hardware as the Xperia X10 Mini. It has a 600 MHz Qualcomm MSM7227 processor and comes with 128 MB internal memory (with support for up to 16 GB microSD cards). It runs Android 1.6 Donut and should get an upgrade to Android 2.1 Eclair soon. The OS and custom UI performance are exactly the same as the X10 Mini. The physical QWERTY keypad is a great improvement over the X10 Mini and increases typing speeds greatly.

Multimedia (2 out of 5)

It comes with a basic image gallery which allows you to browse through the images on the phone and upload images directly to Facebook or Picasa. It also has a video player app with basic play / pause controls which you can use to play 3GP and MP4 video files. The music player has a nice visual interface and offers features like playlists, album art etc. The sound quality is pretty good. It also has an FM radio with RDS support.

The Xperia X10 Mini Pro has a 5 MP camera with autofocus and an LED flash. It can capture images at a maximum resolution of 2560 х 1920 pixels. it can also record VGA video at 30 FPS.

Connectivity (4 out of 5)

It offers almost all the standard connectivity options - GPRS, EDGE, 3G HSDPA, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and microUSB v2.0. It also has a GPS transceiver with A-GPS support.

The Verdict (3 out of 5)

It is a great deal if you liked the Xperia X10 Mini, but want a physical keypad. I would still prefer something with a bigger display, like a Samsung Spica i5700 for that budget.