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>> Kent German: Hi. I'm Kent German, senior editor for CNET.com here with the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10. We're excited to have this phone. It's been a couple of months since it came out. It was Sony Ericsson's first Android phone. It was introduced in the latter half of 2009, and we saw it at CES in 2010, and then we saw it at Mobile World Congress, but this is our first chance to really get our hands on it and give it a good thorough review, so we're excited to do that. The phone's pretty interesting in a lot of ways. Not only, of course, is it Sony Ericsson's first Android phone, as I said, it really has a nice overall design, I think. It is a little big. It is a four-inch display, so that is bigger than the iPhone. It's bigger than most other touch screen phones out there and, personally, I think bigger touch screen, the better, but this is very vibrant and very rich. Sony Ericsson usually does a good job with its displays, and this phone is no exception. Of course [inaudible] it a little tall, make it a little wide. It's not too thick actually. I have the phone in my pocket, and I did notice it. I said, "Well, that's just a little uncomfortable," so it might not be great in a pants pocket but certainly in a coat, or, you know, in a bag, a purse, or anything like that. But certainly very stylish just in terms of the simple design. It's a little curved on the sides. Sony Ericsson actually is doing a lot of this with their phones. They're making them curved to match the curve of your hands. Three simple controls down below. There's the Android menu button, there's a home button, and you can set where that will take you, and then there's also the [inaudible]. On the other side you'll see the camera lens, and over here there's just a couple of controls. There's the volume rocker, there's a camera shutter. Up on the top you'll find the power button, a 3.5 millimeter headset jack, so great that Sony Ericsson's ditching all that proprietary stuff going with the standard headset jack. Also find a micro USB port. That's for USB cable for synching and also for charging. There is a memory card slot behind the battery cover. It is microSD so there's no memory stick micro, again no proprietary format. A few interesting things about this phone is it does something called Timescape. Now this is a new Sony Ericsson interface as part of Sony Ericsson's UXP which is the overall user experience that we've looked at before, but Timescape is very much like Motoblur or [inaudible] the way that it takes all of your contacts in your Facebook, you're MySpace, your Twitter and sort of rolls it all into one, and you can go to a page where you can see all your contacts flowing back and forth and your last communication with them. And you can set, of course, what you want in there, but it can be emails, it can be messages, but then it's also as simple as Facebook status updates and Twitter updates, and it flows in sort of an "s" curved design. You can see it curves like this and then curves down at the bottom. Works kind of well. You can slide up and down. You can go to each individual contact. You can tap them, and then there will be what's called an infinity button which actually if you press that, it shows you all the contact you've had with that person whether it's over email, Facebook, or whatever it might be. So, I've noticed just in my general testing, it seems a little slower than Motorblur. It's certainly slick. I like the design. I like the overall visual effects. Seems to be just the tiniest bit clunky though in terms of connecting back and forth. Getting it all to update frequently and having it flow seems like they'll work on that. Other things worth noticing is phone dialer, pretty standard large buttons with large numbers. I do like the virtual keyboard. It's very spacious, and I like that it throws up all of these suggestions for words you type, and it remembers emails. So, for instance, if I had an email like Kent. German, it would, as I'm typing that, sort of remembers that even though it's not in your dictionary. So I do like that. Main menu is all icons. You, of course, like other Android phones, there's that windowpane. You just move that, slides up. If you slide that up, you get access to the full menu with icons. A couple of shortcuts on the home screen will take you to like messaging, the Timescape. Also there's a Mediascape application which takes your photos and any music and puts them all together. The infinity button also works in the music application, so if you press the infinity control, you can see all the music you have from that individual artist. Other features are the high-resolution camera. It does have Bluetooth. It does have email messaging. You're going to get the personal organizer, so really a stocked feature set, very much. I think Sony Ericsson's first Android phone, it is a good try. I like what I see so far. I am interested though in getting into the Timescape just to see how well it performs. I'm Kent German, and this is the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10.
