Sony Ericsson Xperia X1

Full specifications | Add your review

Sony Ericsson hasn’t gone so far as HTC or Samsung with its interface polishing, but it has made a few welcome tweaks. Press its ‘X Panel’ button and a number of animated thumbnails appear. These are shortcuts to various X Panel applications – various shiny (and highly customisable) Today screens, a media player, Google Apps, and so on. Seven such ‘panels’ are installed by default and others can be downloaded – all six of them… Sony Ericsson has released an X Panel SDK though, so more may appear eventually.

The X Panel can be flipped into two layouts – one that resembles Mac OS Exposé and another that looks like Windows Vista Flip 3D. The sluggish response of the display to touch-screen input makes both less than pleasurable to use though, and both HTC’s Touch FLO 3D and Spb Mobile Shell do a much better job. And oddly enough, the former has already been hacked for the Xperia X1 and the latter is one of the few X Panel additions available for download so far.

We had high hopes for the Xperia X1 (well, as high as they can be for a Windows Mobile 6 device), but it failed to meet our expectations at almost every level. We still think it’s gorgeous and if you ever get to handle one yourself, you’ll find yourself inexplicably reaching for your wallet – resist. The HTC Touch Pro pretty much matches the Xperia X1 feature-for-feature, but is considerably easier to use – and it doesn’t look half bad, either.

• 1
• 2
• 3

We couldn't find any prices for this smartphone. Click for our full smartphone price comparison