The Sony Ericsson Xperia X8 aims to offer smartphone capabilities at an affordable cost.
Look and Feel
The Xperia X8, given to us by Carphone Warehouse, sits between the X10 and X10 mini in terms of size. It offers a 3-inch, 16-million colours TFT display, which is quite vibrant. It’s pretty light, though a little thicker than most smartphones. I tested out the white version, which has a matte cover that doesn’t catch fingerprints. It has three main slim, raised silver buttons – a menu button, a home button and a cancel button, which look and feel great.
Interface
The X8 is pretty easy to use. Its main interface feature includes four customisable corner buttons which provide one touch access to apps, which is convenient. The touchscreen is responsive, making it quick and easy to navigate through. The main menu can either be dragged up on the home screen or with a press of a button – a nice touch to have both options.
Camera
The phone is equipped with a 3.2-megapixel camera and no LED flash. As a result, the phone doesn’t produce a great image. However, it does have some nice organisational features, such as geotagging capabilities and Facebook uploading functionality.
Internet
The 3-inch screen and responsive controls make browsing the internet pretty straight forward, although it doesn’t support double tap zooming. The phone has a focus on social networking, with built-in Twitter and Facebook apps, along with Facebook uploading integration for photos. As a result, it’s a pretty good device for browsing on the go.
Entertainment
The Xperia X8 includes an FM radio and a music player. The player is quite basic, though it does include three smart playlists, including newly added, most played and never played. The phone also includes TrackID, which allows users to find out the name of a song by recording a small part of it.
Apps
The Sony Ericsson phone has Android 1.6, meaning there will be apps on the Android Market that will not be compatible for it. This is a pretty big downfall, however, Sony has said there will be an upgrade for it available shortly. It comes equipped with the Timescape app, which fuses updates from Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live Messenger, texts and missed calls. It’s a good way to integrate communications and looks rather well, too.
Overall
The Sony Ericsson Xperia X8 has a lot of great individual features. Timescape is useful for consolidating chat and the phone itself is fast and easy to use. It does fall down in a few key areas though, particularly in having an older version of Android. That said, at its price, it’s a great handset for someone who doesn’t have a lot of cash, but wants a phone with good social integration and internet connectivity.
The Sony Ericsson Xperia X8 costs from €129.99 from prepay and from free on billpay. Available at Carphone Warehouse, Meteor and O2.
