Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications has launched a new Xperia series, which is going to replace the current P series business handsets. There have been many changes in the nomenclature being used by SEMC these days. The latest in offering in the new Xperia series is X1, which was showcased in the recent GSM World Congress, Barcelona. This is the first ever smart phone being made by Sony Ericsson on the windows platform, previously the Symbian UiQ being the only platform being used by the company for the same. It is also rumored that the Taiwanese Company HTC is actively involved with Sony Ericsson in developing this mobile phone. Its also rumored that soon to be announced P5i would also come in Xperia series and the company would be offering two handsets one based on Symbian and other based on windows mobile.

Sony Ericsson XperiaLets discuss about the X1. The phone is arc slider with form factor similar to HTC TyTn II, but the slide out keyboard comes out in concave arc shape rather than just sliding out. This is possibly more comfortable for watching the screen, when you are typing simultaneously. The phone is made for world as it is quad band plus it also works in both American as well as European frequencies. The feel and build quality of the body is truly class. The phone weighs hefty 450 grams, which is in fact quite heavy and overall thickness of the phone is about 1.8cm at the thinnest end. The mobile phone has full QWERTY keyboard with very comfortably spaced bulged out keys. Previously people with big thumbs had a lot of problems typing with tiny buttoned Qwerty's, but the phone has decently sized keys and also the UI of the phone changes to landscape as soon as you rotate the phone or take out the slider keypad. The screen is 3 inches in diagonal and has XGA resolution of 800x480 pixels, which is larger and better than most of the phones available in market. The OS is rumored to be Windows mobile 6.1, which would be running on Qualcomm's 528 MHz processor, and 128MB ram. This means that the phone would be slick and hardly hang when you would open many applications. The distinct thing about this phone and the other windows mobile devices is that it also features Xperia panels, which are animated panels, which show the short cuts to active as well as frequently used applications. In addition, a very beautiful panel is the fish panel, which features beautiful 3D fish, which also serve as battery, volume as well as missed call indicators as they change colors when any of the events occurs. This is very pleasing to eye. The movement of the fishes is very smooth and the moment you touch the screen, the fishes gather near your finger. The phone is still highly un-documented as well as many of the things it is running, like the Internet Explorer and media centre are still from the old version of WM. However, with such a great resolution and large touch screen, the multimedia experience is going to be heavenly. The phone also features an optical scroll bar, which is very similar to touch pads being used in laptops. It makes browsing in landscape mode very easy.

Xperia Keypad

The handset would also be having a 3megapixel camera with autofocus and flash, though it could have been better Ericsson would have put a 5megapixel sensor instead of 3.2 megapixel one. Video recording is done in VGA resolution@ 30fps, which is pretty much better than the whole Cybershot series of camera phones. The phone comes with ample 400MB storage and for expansion, it has slot for microSD (yes, MicroSD not memorystick!) and SDHC cards with upto 8 GB of storage. The handset is also equipped with a GPS receiver and A-GPS receiver. Rest things are pretty much standard and though highly kept secret until release date. The biggest turn on is the battery which is rated as 1500mAH. With that much juice in battery it is going to kick some serious stuff out there!

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Darren writes on topics such as Sony Ericsson Phones, Cheap Cell Phones, and LG Phones for The Tech FAQ.