A beautiful looking phone, the  Xperia X1 represents perhaps the best mix of corporate and multimedia features available today. It’s an all metal handset finished in brushed aluminium with small amount of chrome thrown in. The X1 feels very solid in-hand. The back cover is metal and very well built but has a slight bulge due to fitting issues. This bulge isn’t due to the battery but the retention mechanism and creates a slight gap; not good for such a high-end phone. The slider is really slick and exudes positive feedback — excellent design. The menu buttons are a little small and sharp more suited for use with fingernails.


The Optical menu button doesn’t work with touch as well, although it can be used as a regular button and pressed — this of course works well. The call buttons are well laid out and very usable. The QWERTY keypad is very good and the keys really well spaced. Our only issue was that the keys seem a little small for proper finger/thumb typing. They are also a bit hard and feedback isn’t very good; it takes a while to get used to their clicky feedback and their size. Having said that, the Xperia X1 is suitable for typing out longer mails. The screen is a crisp 800 x 480 pixels, although it still displays only 65,000 colours; somewhat of a chink in its armour and this limits the experience when playing back videos. The excellent resolution means that fonts are rendered well and look crisp — great for reading large mails and even the finest of text is readable. There are a number of softly lit status lights that light up on the side bezel to indicate received messages, missed calls, etc., but this lighting is minimal and Sony Ericsson  has not overdonethe garishness.

View Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 Video Below

The volume keys are excellent as is the power button  that manages to sit flush with the body while retaining soft feedback and usability. The Xperia has a good camera that while not on par with the best, offers decent quality. Signal quality is good and the Xperia X1 scores well in zone 1 while doing a fair job in zone 2. The earpiece volume and handsfree unit are above par. The bundled earphones are the Sony earplugs that passively isolate noise and the X1 is a good music phone. Its got all the features, its got the build quality, and its got a full keypad to boot. A phone that’s equally suited to corporate users as well as multimedia junkies, although this split personality is exactly what makes it fail short of being a truly spectacluar multimedia phone. However, usability isn’t the best around and neither is the call quality. Small quirks for a mighty device we say.

A beautiful looking phone, the  Xperia X1 represents perhaps the best mix of corporate and multimedia features available today. It’s an all metal handset finished in brushed aluminium...