From HTC Magic to Sony Ericsson Xperia X10
My personal preference goes to anything Android. I used to have one of the HTC phone, but lately I had a chance to play with Sony Ericsson Xperia X10. Price was great, the hardware is excellent, performance is astonishing, look and feel is just as good, but… I didn’t like user experience on Xperia X10. It could be one of the best mobile phones out there, but functional flaws of user interface suggest the design was likely done very much in a hurry.
who made a decision that to answer the call user first has to unlock the screen?
Now, to unlock the Xperia X10 I would have to move slider from left bottom corner up right. Imagine my surprise when one beautiful morning I found the slider sitting the opposite way, so to unlock I would have to move it right to left now? I wouldn’t be a big deal, but given the above problem with answering calls this one seemed rather irritating.
The virtual keyboard. There are two of them, and the default is of course the keyboard designed by Sony Ericsson for Xperia flavor of Android. From usability perspective it’s really bad. I asked number of other Xperia users and couldn’t find one that actually liked it. The main problem with Xperia X10 virtual keyboard is that it takes 2 to 5 attempts to make the desired character to appear. It brings all the adjacent letters, but not the right one. But this one is easy to fix – thanks the open nature of Android, Xperia has the Android’s native virtual keyboard that works as expected – just change it in the settings.
I wish that was all…
I wish that was all. How about frequent calls disconnects supposedly because it reacts on when cheek touches the screen? I was surprised to see this given that Xperia likes to stay locked when users don’t need it, and yet not to lock screen during the conversation.
Is Xperia X10 “best android phone”?
All these complaints might seem insignificant given the overall hardware quality, great camera, etc, but user interface is where customer meets the device. Whatever great features it has, usability problems on the very basic functionality can completely ruin the impression. After all it’s a cellular phone, and it must be good one even before we look how smart it is.
My take on Xperia X10 – there are way too many excellent latest mobile phones to allow users to suffer these inconveniences. Not good enough. I really hope my experience with Samsung Galaxy S Captivate will be better.
