Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2

On September 2, Sony Ericsson announced the upcoming release of the XPERIA X2, which is expected to see the light of day sometime in early Q4. As the XPERIA X1 replacement, the X2 is a big boy weighing in at four ounces and measuring 4.3” x 2.1” x 0.6” – but at least its profile looks like the type of futuristic electric razor you’d see in some Van Damme straight-to-video sci-fi epic. The XPERIA X2 is the first Sony Ericsson smartphone to offer Windows Mobile 6.5, but even Sony reps say that Mobile 6.5 isn’t as good as it should be. While the resistive touchscreen is a nice idea, early reports indicate that it’s as resistive as a good Catholic girl on her first date in the back of a car. Still, Windows Mobile on the XPERIA X2 is stylus-friendly, though the user interface is lagging (you know, like a little brother at the mall during Christmas shopping).

The XPERIA X2 also comes with 14 preloaded panels (16 more are available for download) that give you access to Skype, Mytopia and Google, games, CNN, and Windows Live. Plus there’s SlideView, which happens when you slide out the full QWERTY (there’s no accelerometer on the XPERIA X2), to give you fast access to the phone activities you use most and that means seeing missed incoming activity is made easy.

From a business perspective, there are a few features that make the XPERIA X2 desirable, such as the abilities to sync up your mail and calendar, edit MS Office Mobile docs, make conference calls, and to give presentations on a big screen via the TV out cable and port.

As a Sony product, the smartphone has some qualities that thankfully represent the music side of the company’s legacy, such as displaying album art, Bluetooth stereo, an equalizer, the Sony Ericsson media player, music tones, PlayNow arena, and Windows Media Player (though I’m not a fan).

And for the self-appointed hipster, there’s MMS, SMS, IM, predictive text (‘cause Lord knows it’s tough to type and smoke and drink a double mochaccino and walk with your Chelsea boots, all while thinking you’re the coolest thing since Cobain took the fun out of music), geo tagging, and panel personalization to include Facebook so you can upload your uber-cool scenester pics with ease.

Undressing the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2

Wow, so it seems I spilled the beans on what the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2 is capable of, so to finish I’ll list some of the specs. As you expected, there’s a camera on this smartphone, but it has an excessive 8.1 megapixels (why you need that many on a phone is beyond me). While the camera has AF, touch focus, an image stabilizer, and a camcorder, the 16x digital zoom is pretty useless. Internet features are what you’d expect, including such banal things as bookmarks, Google search, web feeds, and, of course, Internet Explorer.

The most important thing I should mention here is the screen; it’s a 3.2-inch WVGA with 480 x 800 pixels and 65,536 color TFT. Also, onboard memory maxes out at 110MB, but that’s expandable up to 16GB with microSD or microSDHC. Networks include GMS and UMTS with 10 hours and 6 hours of talk time respectively.

As stated earlier, the XPERIA X2 should be out before the end of the year, however, there’s no word on pricing yet.