Almost 5 months with my Xperia X1

I bought my Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 at the end of November last year, and what impressed me has since erroded to dissatisfaction and in some cases plain frustration. The statements i make now are quiet a 180 degree turn around considering how much I touted the Xperia’s awesomeness when I first got it. Much of my dissatisfaction doesn’t come from the device itself; it’s a fine piece of hardware; but more from it’s operating system. Windows Mobile has just really disappointed me. It really hasn’t changed all that much since the 90′s when the first PocketPC came out. It still feels mostly the same, and unfortunately a bit of an unfocused hodgepodge of stuff.

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).