Xperia Arc hands on

Well, what do you know? 'Scotsboyuk'  or Paul Smith just managed to play around with the arc, and in his own words, "it's fucking awesome!!"

All in all it’s a pretty sweet handset and for the first time in years I genuinely felt I was using a handset that hearkened back to Sony Ericsson’s glory days with the T610 or the K750 et al. They seem to have learned their lessons from the X10 and put them into practice, now they just need to make sure they get this out on time.

Read more here.

Xperia Arc gets handled

Rikard at the Product blog has just posted a new video in which the new Xperia Arc is taken for a spin.
He also clarified quite a few details:

1. The CPU and GPU specs are: MSM8255 at 1 GHz with Adreno 205.
2. The music player does have an equalizer, my current software has 10 different genre based presets.
3. It does not have a front facing camera.
4. Mediascape is removed in its earlier form and has changed into a customizable widget based “media pane” (as shown briefly in the video)
5. It’s too early to officially give detailed comments around specific later Android versions for XperiaTM arc during its lifecycle but the changes we have made to our way of working with Android puts us in a good position to make sure that Xperia arc will get later versions in a timely manner.
6. I’ve seen articles around higher numbers than 2.3 being seen in the display of Xperia arc phones – As I have been informed that is due to a misconfiguration in some samples and nothing to get too excited about really, sorry.
7. It does have two microphones which will be used for noise suppression during phone calls.
8. The camera LED flash is possible to put in four different modes; Auto, Fill-flash, Red-eye Reduction & Off.
9. It does have full multi touch support, I just tried a similar multi touch test app as I did in the video on the X10 and at least in that app it accepts 4 simultaneous touch points without any issues with X- and Y-axis or such things. I will try to get confirmation on final specs in regards to multi touch.
10. It does support wi-fi up to the 802.11n mode.

Xperia Arc Preview

Rog at SE-First has already posted first impressions of the Xperia Arc.

Here's an excerpt from his preview:

The camera in the Xperia arc shoots pictures with 8 MP resolution. More interesting than the megapixel count however is the fact that Sony Ericsson is using an EXMOR R sensor for the first time in a mobile phone. This sensor has been developed by Sony and is supposed to enhance picture quality in dark environments, thanks to a back illuminated sensor which reduces the noise. This addresses one of the problems that have been around with CMOS sensors in mobile phone cameras: the bad performance in low light conditions. This special sensor was so far only used in Sony's snapshot cameras.

Sony Ericsson sure know a thing or two about designing phones. The Arc is easily the most beautiful Android smartphone ever.

Image courtesy: SE-First

Xperia X10 mini Preview

The folks at Phone Arena have posted a nice video preview of the small yet powerful Android device.

Spiro and Zylo - Hands On

The folks at SE-First got a chance to play with these new Walkman devices. The 9 minute preview shows the UI, Facebook and Twitter client and how it matches up to other devices design wise. Enjoy!

XPERIA X10 Previewed

Our friends over at SE-blog have just posted a neat video preview of the X10, focusing mainly on Timescape and Mediascape.Definetely worth a watch if you're thinking this Android powerhouse.

XPERIA X10 Video Review

Here's a pretty neat video review of the soon to be launched XPERIA X10. India is slated to be the first country to get the device.

Vivaz: Homescreen in detail

Here's a pretty nice video by the folks at Sony Ericsson which shows off the homescreen of the Vivaz, in a lot more detail than you've seen earlier. So if this is the handset you're looking to get, I'd recommend giving this vid a watch!

Sony Ericsson Vivaz ( Kurara) announced

Finally! The Kurara has been announced as the Sony Ericsson Vivaz. It looks way better than in those leaked pics doesn't it? :)

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz runs on the Symbian S60 platform and packs a 8 megapixel autofocus camera capable of recording 720p video. The 3.2" display sports a resolution of 640 x 360 pixels and is capable of showing up to 16M colors. The CPU inside clocks at 720 MHz ( the Satio has a 600 MHz processor).

Other features include a microUSB slot, Wi-Fi, GPS, quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and 3G with HSDPA. 

Other interesting notables are a 3.5mm audio jack, the FM radio and a built-in microSD card slot that allows expanding the 75MB of internal memory. There will be an 8GB microSD card included in the retail package.

It’ll be available at the end of Q1 in four colours – Cosmic Black, Galaxy Blue, Moon Silver and Venus Ruby.

Here are a few videos for you to enjoy. The first one is a short promo video of the Sony Ericsson Vivaz and the next one is a video overview of the handset.

And lastly, here's a developer preview video. Enjoy!

Official Press Release
Official Product Page

XPERIA X10 Live Pics

The folks at Esato have just had the chance to play around with the upcoming XPERIA X10. They have posted loads of high quality pics of the X10 which really makes you impatient - it is expected to be launched in Feb 2010. Click the images below for the full view :)

See more Pics of the Xperia X10

Xperia X10 Hands-On

Michell attended a local Xperia X10 event yesterday where he managed to play around with the X10 for a while. Quite a bit of new info and loads of nice pictures. Here's an excerpt:


"I simply love the Timescape application. It seems to work brilliantly. Note that it’s a separate application developed by Sony Ericsson and that the default home screen is the ordinary Android home screen. You can however set Timescape to be your home screen, if that’s what you want. An awesome thing is that it’s modular, meaning you can check which tabs to show and you’ll even be able to install plugins to add additional tabs."

"Face recognition seems to be an excellent feature, capable of tagging people in the photos you take and receive on your X10."

"The phone does come with a built-in magnometer (compass), and coupled with the GPS you can use augmented reality applications. I was shown one application in which you could add several different layers on top of the camera view."

"It’ll be released with Android version 1.6, but a future firmware update will introduce Android 2.0. The major improvements in 2.0 have however already been added to the X10 by Sony Ericsson, i.e. Bluetooth file transfer, Exchange support and social media services support.The pricing of the X10 will be roughly the same as the launch price of the Satio."


Read his complete Xperia X10 report

Xperia Pureness Hands-On

The folks at Engadget got a chance to play around with the Xperia Pureness..yeah, the one with the somewhat gimmicky transparent screen. Transparent you say? Yup, you heard right!

Anyway, here's what they had to say:

The capabilities of the phone should come as no surprise to anyone who's used a Sony Ericsson Java-happy dumbphone in the past, and the handset also has that wild variety of face buttons that are typical on a SE handset. Up top, with the d-pad flush on the face, things start to get crowded, but overall the phone is pretty usable tactile-wise. The meaty numeric pad should be a boon to a T9 afficianado, and we even managed to play a game of Pacman on the handset. Overall the materials used are nice and XPERIA-ey, but the most overt luxury item here is the block of glass that serves as the screen.

Sony Ericsson Satio video Preview

Our friend Michell over at se-blog,com has posted a 17-minute video preview of the Sony Ericsson Satio. I suggest you get a cup of coffee before you sit down to enjoy the show!

XPERIA X10's snappy UI showcased

Sony Ericsson's Android-based XPERIA X10 was mighty sluggish in the initial videos, but this new video from hdblog.it shows what looks like a much newer software build that's dramatically faster and more responsive.Looks like the snapdragon is doing its job here and doing it pretty well. Enjoy the video!

Xperia X10 Preview - Live Pics & Video

Rog has posted a huge preview of the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 over at se-first.com. They have covered everything including Timescape, Mediascape, e-mail client, browser, messaging and camera app and there's also loads of pics for you to drool over.

The key features are:

• Android 1.6 (Donut)
• WVGA screen (480 x 854)
• Scratch resistant, 4 inches, capacitive TFT touchsreen
• Size: 119 x 63 x 13 mm, 135 grams
• 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250 processor
• Sony Ericsson Timescape™ & Mediascape™ User Interface2
• HSPA
• 8 Megapixel camera with touchfocus, multipoint-focus, automatic scene detection, smile detection
• WVGA video recording
• Face recognition on pictures
• aGPS
• Exchange ActiveSync
• 3.5mm headset jack, miniUSB connector
• 1500mAh battery

Let's have a look at the newly introduced concept of Timescape and Mediascape, which basically represents Sony Ericsson's customization of the Android UI.

Timescape™ is - in short - a way of displaying a variety of interactions with traditional and social networks, ordered chronologically on a timeline. It includes events of the following categories:

• Incoming SMS/MMS
• Incoming mails
• Incoming calls
• Twitter Tweets of people you are subscribed to
• Facebook wall posts of your facebook account
• Camera pictures taken

Mediascape consists of three areas: Music, Photos and Videos. The music part features an overview where the upper part of the screen represents the music that is already available on the XPERIA X10 ('My Music'). The lower part shows a selection of recommended and new tracks from Sony Ericsson's music platform, the PlayNow arena. For those who don't like to get purchase proposals, the PlayNow-arena can be switched off, so that the phone shows local contenct only.
The video section features a video player that shows videos stored on the phone. It is capable of playing videos in landscape and portrait format. Not much more to say - other than that the videos look gorgeous on the large 4'' screen!

Since Android is a new platform to Sony Ericsson phones, the camera application also got a little makeover. Certainly the biggest news in this area is the face recognition - probably a direct benefit of X10's very fast 1GHz processor, since face recognition technology requires some processing power. Other novelties in the camera area are the multi-point focus and the touch recording for videos. Also nice: the last 5 videos/pictures taken are shown in a small strip at the bottom of the camera, for fast access to sharing or deleting the pictures just taken.

The camera shoots pictures in the following resolutions: 8MP (4:3), 6MP (16:9), 2MP (4:3) and 2MP (16:9)

Videos can be captured in WVGA, VGA, QVGA and optimized for MMS and the online video services YouTube, Flick and Picasa.

XPERIA X10 videos

Firstly, I'll advise you to make yourself a cup of coffee as this is going to keep you glued to your computer screen for quite some time :) Here are loads of videos related to the X10 which are worth a watch.

I'd suggest you refill your glass and then check out the videos after the break.

XPERIA X10 - Live Pics, Preview

The folks at Engadget have managed to lay their hands on a prototype of the XPERIA X10 and they've posted a short hands-on experience which is worth a read.

Kudos to SE for stepping outside of its featurephone comfort zone, and eagerly await the final results of this unquestionably ambitious project.

The guys over at GsmArena seldom disappoint and as always, have already posted their Preview of the XPERIA X10.

Here's what they had to say:

The Sony Ericsson X10 units presented at the event were devilishly fast in all Android tasks and applications, but the proprietary UI by Sony Ericsson clearly needed a lot more work.The XPERIA X10 is also impressively light for its huge screen real estate.

When asked, Sony Ericsson explained they've designed, constructed and manufactured the X10 from the ground up all by themselves and they're not relying on another company such as HTC to do the manufacturing this time.

Obviously using Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 for web browsing will be a real treat. In fact there are a lot of websites that will fit into 848 pixels worth of width without having a side scrollbar. It almost feels as if next year we'll be seeing mobile phones matching the resolution of your regular netbook, doesn't it? 

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 runs on the user-friendly Android 1.6 OS (codenamed Donut). Unfortunately, version 2.0 is still a no-go for the time being and there are no plans for an official upgrade to the latest version.Another nasty surprise is that the OS won't be making use of multi-touch gestures such as pinch zooming in the web browser and gallery.
That being said, Sony Ericsson still had some impressive new UI all set on the Android phone and though it still needed a lot of polishing around the edges, it surely showed some nice potential.

Timescape is a user interface (or simply put - an application) that brings all your communications together. It gets activated by pressing the Timescape widget on the homescreen and displays an aggregated view of your SMS, MMS, email, missed calls, Facebook updates and Twitter updates all on one screen. A longer press on a tile lets you preview its content.  
 

Quite similarly called, Mediascape gathers all your media together. Music photos and video each have a dedicated homescreen divided in two parts – local and online. 
  

A clever automatic face recognition system has been integrated in the images department as well, recognizing up to five faces in any image. Once you name each of those faces, it goes ahead and recognizes all its appearances in your phone gallery. What's even more, tapping on the face on any of those photos afterwards, allows you to call or text that person.

Check out the lock screen. Looks pretty cool doesn't it?

Well, it's been nice to check out what Sony Ericsson have been up to lately. From what we see they certainly have been hard at work in the upper segment of their portfolio and we really like to think that they've been equaly hard laboring in the midrange behind closed doors. Anyways, the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 might as well be their magnum opus after a long period of setbacks and we really hope it will get them back on track. We quite enjoyed what we saw and we're looking forward to seeing some more once the X10 gets a more polished custom UI and more balanced performance.

Youserbase reviews the Satio and the Aino

Sony Ericsson has been teasing us with these two devices for quite some time now. And there's more to come from SE's stable ( Read: Rachael and Xperia X2). This video review is pretty lengthy, so make sure you've got yourself a cup of coffee before starting it up! :)

AINO

Another Satio Hands-on Video

Here's another hands on video of the Sony Ericsson Satio. The interface looks pretty neat and zippy. ( Its in french though :) )

Via: USEB

Satio, Aino and Yari video Previews

The accent is a bit strange, but not difficult to decipher :) Check out the videos!