I have had the op­por­tu­nity to test Sony Ericsson’s forth­com­ing mo­bile phone Xpe­ria X1 for a cou­ple of days. Here’s my first views on this phone. 

The first thing that strikes me when I got is was how small it was, Sure I had that it was small. But most often thats just talk. But in this case it was re­ally true. If you look at what this phone con­tains, a full QWERT key­board and still it is not greater than, for ex­am­ple the Sony Er­ic­s­son K850 or Nokia N82. 

I have pre­vi­ously ques­tioned the use of a qw­erty key­board & thought it was un­nec­es­sary and, above all very in­flex­i­ble. But the more I used the X1, the more I liked to have ac­cess to the keyboard. 

But what sep­a­rates this phone com­pared with many oth­ers is that there are so many nav­i­ga­tion op­tions, you can use the key­board to lots of things but then you have a touch screen and an op­ti­cal mouse that makes you re­ally easy to nav­i­gate quickly in the phone. You sim­ply choose the ap­proach that is best for the job you are doing in the phone. Moreover the phone feels very solid and well built. 

Look­ing at the con­tent we find Win­dows Mo­bile, an op­er­at­ing sys­tem that I’m not quite fond of and this is not be­cause I am an “apple fan boy” (okay maybe a lit­tle). But the biggest rea­son is that I have al­ways thought it to be very messy and small, hard to nav­i­gate sim­ply. For­tu­nately, Sony Ericsson’s solved this largely with their ap­pear­ance as the so called X panel. Which means that you can eas­ily nav­i­gate be­tween a num­ber of pan­els or desk­tops, which then con­tains dif­fer­ent things. For ex­am­ple a desk­top that is made for brows­ing, one that is made for lis­ten­ing to music and so on. 

The only dis­ad­van­tages I can think of is maybe the for­mat, if you have a big hands. Then it can pos­si­bly be a lit­tle dif­fi­cult to use the key­board, but I’m not sure. Then there is Win­dows Mo­bile, most often you only nav­i­gate through the X pan­els. But some­times you en­counter Win­dows in the back­ground and then it just doesn’t look as fresh. But de­spite this, it is ab­solutely thumbs up for this phone.