Hands-on review: Sony Xperia X1

It's not an iPhone, and for many that's half the appeal: Sony's $800 (unlocked) Xperia X1 is the most expensive mainstream cell phone on the market, but it's one of the sexiest handsets around that doesn't start with an "i" and end in "phone."

The main X1 interface is unlike any other handset you've tried, and you'll notice the difference immediately as you punch into the XPanel home screen, a custom dashboard that lets you quickly -- and stylishly -- jump from one application to another, usually with just a single touch. You get nine panes to work with. By default they include an FM radio, calendar, clock, photo viewer, and the Opera web browser (a much appreciated improvement over the IE browser included with Windows Mobile, atop which all of this is built). Some Xperia-specific apps, including a bizarre system that uses colored fish as alerts, are also on tap to baffle you for months. Dig into the settings and you can mix and match the apps you want to appear and download new apps from Sony's website.

The phone is a horizontal slider, and when closed the front of the phone features a three-inch touchscreen (with a whopping 800 x 480 pixel resolution) with a small collection of buttons beneath it. Of special note is the center action button, which also works as a tiny touchpad in many applications while you drag your fingertip around on it.

Flip the phone on its side and slide the screen up and you get a full QWERTY keyboard, a real blessing for those of us cursed with the inability to type on touchscreens. The buttons on the keyboard are a bit too flush for my taste -- typing with two thumbs didn't work well for me -- but it beats tapping on the screen with a stylus. The design is very sturdy (and not too heavy at 5.6 ounces), and the phone, on the whole, feels like it will be able to handle multiple drops to the floor.

Other features include a nice 3.2 megapixel camera (though it's dog slow to focus) and a microSD slot (no Memory Stick for this bad boy), which is located under the battery panel cover. The phone supports 3G, but only if you use an AT&T SIM card, but it also has Wi-Fi built in to pick up the slack no matter what network you're on. GPS (and Google Maps) are also in the box. I haven't done a full battery drain test on the handset, but Sony rates it for six hours. Judging by experience and the size of the battery, that seems like a fair guess.

In addition to notes above, I have a few smallish complaints with the phone. The biggest problem is that Windows Mobile underlies the innovative XPanel, and I found I had to scurry back into WM more often than I'd like in order to get certain things done. I wish Sony would have enhanced the OS it uses on its Walkman handsets instead of building on Windows... though I do understand the benefits that Windows Mobile gets you, including email and application viewers. But still, do we really need both Opera and IE on one handset?

The X1 also has some general performance problems: Apps load so slowly that I often found myself clicking a button twice, which would then inadvertently undo what I was trying to do while I waited for the phone to catch up. Everything is kind of pokey, even the web browser. Whether it's a slow CPU or all those layers of OS that slows the Xperia down I don't know, but it's bothersome to the point of frustration.

Lastly there's that little matter of price tag. Who will pay $800 for a cell phone? No matter how excited I am about the mini-touchpad and the XPanel system, I can't justify spending nearly a grand on this handset. Subsidize it to $200 with a contract and I'm on board.