Sigh… So, what to do now… Hopefully, nothing will come of it, but I can tell you I’m about ready to toss my $800 phone out the window. I never had this type of embarassing situation occur with any other phone I’ve owned, not even my old Hitachi G1000 WinMo phone… But I won’t let this fun situation perturb me too much (unless I get fired). But it did set me off on a Google search. I figure I can’t be the only WinMo user that is suffering with this intolerable situation, and I may have found something. A freeware application exists called S2U2, a Slide Unlocker that mimic’s the way the iPhone works (a common thing nowadays). Everytime your daft WinMo device turns on, this thing appears and you have to slide a slider to unlock the phone! Genius! Go to http://www.ac-s2.com/ to download it today! I’ve already installed it and so far, I think this is the answer to my prayers and may help prevent me from destroying this phone! I’ll write about my experience in a few days.

To WinMo’s defense, the operating system was made to be flexible and open, leaving much to the developer to decide what to do. But the unfocused freedom shows. For all the amenities Sony Ericsson  had put into the Xperia, there are just some annoyances that have really bothered me. I will try to break down my grievences below.

Phone Calls

Well, let’s face it, my primary goal for buy this device was to have a phone. In general calls work fine when made, but the UI for the phone is less than stellar. For this, it isn’t Microsoft’s fault, but Sony Ericsson’s. I wonder if the designers even used the phone in real life, outside of their development labs.

The first and probably most annoying problem is how the touch screen is enabled whenever there is any alert. The screen activating whenever an alert happens is fine if the phone is sitting on my desk, but  when the device is in my pocket, problems arise. The issue is when an alert wakes up the entire phone’s screen, any contact with the screen will trigger some kind of interaction. So if the device is in my pocket, it’s a guarantee that once the phone is alerted, the next time I take it out of my pocket, I’ll be inadvertently adding an event to my calendar, setting my clock, adding a new task, adding a new contact or in some other place I don’t want to be. Also I can’t begin to say how many calls I missed because when reaching for my phone in my pocket, I tapped something I didn’t want, causing my call to be ignored. It would have been more thoughtful if the alerts came onto a screen that disabled the main UI functions until the phone was unlocked.

The Second problem is upon hitting the send button when making a call; the number pad disappears. Having the number pad go away may be ok if I’m just make a call to my wife, or a friend, but if I’m calling for work, I’ll need to dial additional numbers to access my conference line or enter passwords, I need to click an additional button to get my keypad back. During a call, while the phone is up against my face, the touch screen is also still active, so it isn’t unusual for me to pull the phone away from my head and discover I’m looking at my power settings, or doing any number of things that I didn’t intend to do.

Web Browsing

The next area of my angst lies with surfing the internet using either IE or Opera. The major problem here is that the mobile web model for windows mobile is old, made when mobile broadband was charged by the byte, so it was important to send as little data as possible to prevent skyrocketing costs. What you get is a dumbed down, very limited set of features, when visiting a site. If you want to view the full HTML of a page, it requires extra effort to do so, and the experience of navigating around a web page is cumbersome. The experience pales in comparison to using Safari on an iPhone, where the browsing experience is almost identical to that of a desktop.

Backup and Syncing

Syncing the Xperia with Outlook works as expected, but I did run into a problem at one point. Strangely one day, my Xperia just stopped being recognized by Vista or XP as a mobile device that can sync with ActiveSync or the Vista equivalent. It just stopped working. The device was still recognized by the OS, in that I can access the memory on the phone and my storage card in the phone. Soft resetting the phone didn’t help, and no settings appeared out of the ordinary.

The only thing I could do was attempt to backup my phone settings and do a hard restart… Oh wait! I can’t backup my device. You see, apparently the backup/restore option is now unavailable on Windows Mobile 6 devices. In the past, on older WinMo devices, a problem existed where if the battery on your device completely drained it reverted back to factory default settings. If this situation occurred (which it often did) you had to resort to the ActiveSync backup/recovery function to get your device back to the way you had it before the battery drain (or at least since the last time you backed up). But now, WinMo devices can retain their information, and a battery drain no longer causes the device to revert to factory defaults. With this problem finally solved, Microsoft decided people don’t need a backup/restore feature anymore, and therefore took it away. So, I had no choice but to do a hard reset without saving my settings, so it was all back to 5 months ago, and I had to redo all my settings, customizations and reinstall all my apps and redo my sync settings. To say I was annoyed is an understatement. But doing the hard reset got my device to be recognized by my Activesync. I now need to invest money in backup software for my phone.

Anything Positive?

All the negativity of this article probably begs the question of whether or not there is anything positive, and well, there still is. The primary positive of any WInMo phone is the freedom to what you want with the phone. Unlike the iPhone, which limits you to what Apple offers (if you don’t jailbreak it), you can pretty much do as you please with the phone. You can go around the internet and find useful apps and just simply install them. What WinMo lacks is an official App Store like what Apple offers. Handango is a nice alternative in the meantime until Microsoft creates one (which I understand they are).

The Query keyboard is very nice, as other reviews around the web already talk about, and the windows mobile office apps are unsurpassed. But it’s very hard to praise this phone and OS when you compare it to the user experience that the iPhone offers, Apple did so much right, and I hope that Microsoft learns a thing or two from what Apple has created, because honestly, the stuff under the hood may have improved with Windows Mobile 6, but they really let the front end experience lag behind. I think much of my complaints can also be addressed by Sony Ericcson, if they modify their UI components to address the screen activation issues, and hopefully the Xperia will be upgradable to future versions of the OS when they come out. Only time will tell, and right now, I’m a bit stuck with my investment in this phone, since I’m not keen on switching over to AT&T any time soon (I’ll save this rant for another day).

The Xperia comes with Google Maps installed and uses desktop and windows mobile software called WayPoint. From my initial loading of the software, Waypoint’s desktop client is used to get maps for the phone version to use. I grabbed the New York area maps, and I thought they loaded ok, but when I went to use it today, it didn’t have any maps… It also turns out that Waypoint is only a trial. I’ve not looked into what it’ll cost yet, but it comes up with a buy notice now. But does let me in… I’ve not played around with this much, since it has no maps…

There’s additional software on the phone called “Quick GPS”, which downloads your location from the nearby cell towers which seems to speed up locating you, but that’s not all that accurate, not until the satellites hone in on you does it get better. I recently added a data plan to my existing T-Mobile plan, so I don’t know if this feature works without a data plan.

Using Google Maps is pretty simple, I was able to look up a restaurant on my way there, and it found it on the map and gave me directions based upon my GPS location. It also gave me detailed info including address and phone number. There’s doesn’t seem to be a real time turn by turn navigation with Google Maps, which is where Waypoint must come in.

Overall, so far the GPS doesn’t seem to be as easy to start with as the Nokia, since the GPS on the phone depends on the application you have on the phone running it. I’ll need to give this more time to see how it works overall. It does appear to have quite alot of potential in terms of what you are openly able to do with it, from a development standpoint, that seems pretty nice, but as it is now, it won’t get me to my destination any faster than my Nokia, or my friends Garman.

I clearly need to play with this a bit more

Video Continued:

From my previous posts, I’ve already talked about my disappointment with the video playback of mp4 files, which, the native software doesn’t playback well at all. This was especially disappointing when you consider that my iPod Touch and Nokia n95 (where they were recorded from) plays them perfectly.

I downloaded the Divx Mobile player and tested the playback of Divx files, the Divx Mobile Players is very rudimentary, the UI was not made for a touch screen, and it was also not made for the resolution the Xperia offers, it’s understandable, since up till now, every other mobile device has a screen with half the resolution. The player’s slider controls are hard to get at and the text on the menu’s is barely readable due to the small size. Overall, the playback of Divx files is adequate, but using the player leaves a lot to be desired.

I read in an article in Smartphone magazine that Core Player is good, but it’s commercial ($30), which I might try, but it’s a little disappointing that I have to buy another media player because the one that comes on it doesn’t really do the job well enough.

Lastly, the thing I noticed is that the media panel and the windows mobile player do not zoom the video up to fill the screen, there’s an area of black around the movie, which I find exceptionally wasteful in light of the awesome display that’s on Xperia.

Bluetooth:

Now that I’m using the phone, I needed to move my old Motorola headset from my n95. Windows Mobile did a nice job of easily finding my headset, but the UI doesn’t do a good job of notifying you that you now have a headset paired up and active. I see in the task bar that bluetooth is visible, but not until I make a call that there is any indication that the headset is working. Oddly enough, at times, I expect to talk through my headset, but the headset doesn’t go on, and the caller is then trying to talk to me through my handset… A tad annoying. The Xperia is also missing voice dialing, something I’m starting to miss. My old Nokia n95 had a rudimentary voice dialer, and although not great, it worked, so I could simply tap my headset, and say “home”, and it would call home. I can’t do that with the Xperia.

Looking online, it seems that my problems could be solved by buying the BlueAnt v1, which I might do, but I can’t find anyone talking about this for WinMo devices; the company demo shows it working with an iPhone. I might need to buy it and try it out, and then at least I’ll have something else to talk about on this blog.

I didn’t have too much luck getting the Xperia to sync up to my Compaq 2710p Tablet through Bluetooth. Xp spun around looking for my device… But the Xperia found my tablet… This is an area I’ll need to experiment a little more on.

Exchange Syncing:

I was curious to see if this had changed at all. I’m no stranger to Exchange and Windows Mobile. I’ve performed this task way back when I had a Compaq iPaq, and my Sprint/Hitachi G1000 WinMo phone. I didn’t expect any issues here. But I did run into an issue, the connection was easy enough, but it turns out my company’s exchange server required security to allow syncing, so unknowingly I said ok, and put a pin in… BIG MISTAKE, after that, the device required me to put that stupid pin in every time I wanted to use the damn thing. I can’t tell you how exceptionally annoying this was! Sadly, I couldn’t undo it! Under the Settings -> Lock, the checkbox option for “Prompt if unused for” was checked and it was grayed out, so I couldn’t turn it off! Long story short, I wasted an entire morning trying to figure out how to restore my device back to normal without resorting to a hard reset, luckily I found the problem. I had to install PHM Regedit and modify my registry on the phone to re-enable the option. Once I did that, I was able to turn off the password lock. This obviously is not a failing of the Xperia, but of WIndows Mobile. I was highly annoyed by this; I don’t appreciate anyone dictating how I can use my device. I wouldn’t mind putting my password in for syncing to Exchange, but to force the entire device to use a pin/password to even use it is unacceptable to me.

Besides the lock problem, the device sync’d up nice and easily, and once my credentials were stored in my profile, my email, notes, files, etc, all sync’d up nicely.

Music / Audio:

I next decided to try and drop music onto the device. Since, the device is stingy on installed memory, I put my 4gb MicroSD card in. I can’t be grateful enough for Sony Ericsson dropping their horrid Memory Stick format for this phone. I would have been even more thrilled if they would have just put an easy access door to access the MicroSD slot, but alas, it’s stuck behind the battery cover; which is nice and metal, but awfully hard to remove (my broken fingernails are a testament to that).

I simply dropped some mp3′s onto my MicroSD card, and went to the media panel. The media panel found my music without any problems, and I was able to quickly and easily start playing my music. The only thing I need to figure out now is how to build playlists and add album art. This is an area that Windows in general suffers, and Apple completely excels at. Using WIndows Media Player to manage media is about as much fun as stabbing forks in my eyes… Microsoft really really needs to work on this, because trying to show my wife how to manage her playlists in Media Player 11 for her Sandisk Sansa was really no fun…

Lastly, I wanted to customize my ringtones, so I simply dropped some mp3 clips I made into the Ringtones folder, and I was able to choose them for various notifications on the Xperia. My only complaint here is with the speaker on the Xperia, it’s on the lower left side behind a little slot. It’s very easy to block and muffle. The volume is also a little on the lighter side, it’s not bad, but my Nokia N95 had stereo speakers on both sides that could blow my house down…

Battery Life:

Overall, the battery life is ok, I wouldn’t say it’s stellar, and woe is the owner who forgets to turn WiFi off. I find that I’ll need to charge this thing at least once a day, and i’ll be pretty low if I let it go a day and a half. In general it’s ok for a WinMo device. This is an area that I’ve not paid too much attention to though, and I believe there are some guides out on the net for maximizing battery life, so I’ll need to dig up some info for better battery life.

Next Time:

This post is getting quite long, so I’m going to stop it here for now. I’m also going to stop day numbering my review, because I’m having difficulty keeping track of the days. The next post I’ll write about the Camera, my final thoughts and a final comparison of the Xperia against my other devices.

On my memory card, I have about a years worth of videos and photos, taken with the n95. The n95 takes video directly in .mp4 format, and does so very well. I was sorely disappointed though to learn how badly the Xperia plays these files. The n95 comes with a version of Real Player, and plays back the .mp4′s perfectly. The Xperia will play them, but the frame rate and audio sync are beyond poor, I believe it probably had a frame rate of 1 frame a second ( I am not joking! ). These same .mp4′s also play back flawlessly on my iPod Touch, when moved to it by dragging from the memory card onto my iPod in iTunes. Very sad indeed.

The next thing I tried were some Divx files I converted using Divx Convertor. WinMo doesn’t support Divx, but the folks at Divx offer a free Mobile Divx player. I downloaded the latest one and installed it. The program ran, but it was clearly not designed for the immense resoltution of the Xperia. The text and options were impossible to click on with your finger, so I had to use the stylus, and even then, it was hard to read the options. Playback was also relatively poor, but at least it was better then the .mp4′s…

Lastly, I had some .3gp files I converted with 3gpConverter. I compressed them using the PSP playback settings of QVGA/29.97fps/768Kbps Stereo/126kps. I found this setup makes .3gp files that playback nicely on my PSP, Onda, N95 and the Xperia X1.

My video experience with the X1 is a tad disappointing. I would have hoped that with all this horsepower that it would at least play the mp4 files, but alas, no. So, the Xperia won’t be replacing my Creative Zen or Onda VX770 anytime soon.

So, now, I was stuck, something obviously wasn’t right with the T-Mobile network configuration. It worked the night before on my Nokia N95, so, I know the data portion of my plan is setup correctly. So, I went over to my local T-Mobile shop, and showed off the phone to the drooling store manager. Unfortunately, he wasn’t much help. I then went home and gave T-Mobile support a call. I didn’t know how they would treat me, since I’m in the US, using an unlocked/unsupported phone. Luckily, they were very pleasant (I’ve had good luck with T-Mobile, which is why I’m still a customer). I got sent over to Tier 3 support, and although the nice young lady on the other end wasn’t quite sure what to do, she had a script about setting up network connections on Windows Mobile devices. So, she got me to the general area to where I needed to fix. So, here’s the fix folks:

1. Go to the START menu -> Settings.
2. Click the Connections tab.
3. Click Connections Icon.
4. Select “Add a new modem connection“.
5. Give the connection some name, this isn’t important. Select Cellular Line (GPRS, 3G) for the modem. Click Next.
6. Access Point Name needs to be internet2.voicestream.com (I believe this is for the $25 add-on data plan, I recall someplace on the net I found a reference to internet3 for the next tier data plan). Click Next.
7. Leave the next set of options blank and click FINISH.
8. Back on the Connections page, click the “Set up my proxy server” option. Make sure you check the box next to “This network connects to the internet“.
9. Now the important one, click the Modem tab at the bottom. Select the connection you just added, make sure you DO NOT have the Auto Pick option selected.
10. Done, now you should be ready to surf the day away!

It turns out the problem stems from the phone auto detecting wap.voicestream.com access point, which I believe is their t-zones server. So, that was a fun waste of a few hours. So hopefully this information will help someone out.

Now that I got onto the net, how is the browser experience… With Internet Explorer, not so fantastic, but with Mobile Operat 9.5 it hurt less. This area is where the iPhone and iPod Touch’s trump the Windows Mobile device. The screen is already small, but with the resolution so high on this device the text is just that smaller. I’m now spoiled by the iPhone’s multi-touch zoom and overal responsiveness of the iPhone Safari browser. But Opera works well enough, and once I got used to working with it, I was equally productive. I was able to easily setup my Windows Messaging to pull email from my yahoo and google email accounts. The next thing I need to do, is sync it with my Exchange server at work.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk about my experiences with hooking the thing up to my PC.

Opening the BoxPretty Box

Opening the Box

Look at all the hardware

Upon actually holding it, the first thing I noticed was how incredible it felt, the build quality of the phone is exceptional, many of the parts are actually metal! The phone is quite small, I think partly due to it’s side to side width (it’s a tall phone).

So, that’s in the box, well, we have a usb cable, a outlet converter for the usb cable, so you can charge it through its usb cable by plugging it into the wall. An extra stylus, ear buds, and a standard sony connector which has some basic walkman controls on it. The box has some simple to look at quick documentation, and a CD for the Activesync and Wayfinder GPS software (more on this later).

OK, so now what, well, it’s time to put the SIM card and battery in. For reference, my old phone is a Nokia N95, it’s a fantastic phone, and it’s still for the most part a top of the line phone, which has no equal in the US (as far as Nokia offers here).

Swapping SIM

To swap the SIM cards, I need to open up both phones, the first thing I noticed on the X1 is how sturdy the door was, it’s made of metal! My Nokia’s is a rather thin plastic door, it’s surprisingly durable, but it feels awefully fragile in comparison.You’ll also notice how much larger the battery on the X1 is too.

So, one the SIM was in, I powered it on, it took a bit to boot up, but it found my T-Mobile settings without issue, that is, the phone settings. Internet access was a problem, I’ll get to this a little later. The X1 screen sports a 800×480 screen! This is double the resolution of an IPhone or any other phone out there and at only 3 inches, needless to say, the screen is awesome!

For now, I’ll end this entry off with a snapshot of the X1 compared to my Nokia n95 and my trusty old Motorola Razr. I’ll let you be the judge for how it stacks up size wise, but in my opinion, the size is quite good in comparison, the thickness (which you can’t see here) is on par with the Nokia, and of course my Razr is much thinner.

Side by side with some of my older phones