Saturday, August 6, 2011

sony ericsson x10 mini pro and xperia mini pro

First let us talk about sony ericsson x10 mini pro.

xperia x10 mini pro(my previous phone) was a great android phone in terms of looks, the processing power and the "slide in back jeans pocket" size. The cons were it ran android 2.1, it had phone memory of ~125 MB(So, u are limited by this memory in terms of number of apps u run on the phone. 2.1 does not support transferring apps to sd. So, there you are stuck with a few apps. You have to uninstall and install any additional app u require), It had a 5 MP autofocus camera but could not record videos in HD, The screen size was very yesterday (240x320) and 2.5" screen size(The first GNU/Linux touchscreen phone, from motorola, a motorola a1200 had the same resolution and screen size), No multitouch, Flaky bluetooth functionality, Support for external memory limited to 16 GB. The most important negative is there is no custom built distro(cyanogenmod) to replace the OS,which is complete. All custom roms have issues related to the camera and fm radio.
No adobe flash vides support(thanks to android 2.1 and processor with armv6 architecture running at 600Mhz. Thanx also to the adobe developers who cannot develop the flash player for this architecture)
Four corners with quick launch(one app in every corner), sony ericsson's custom UI.
No front facing camera.

Now, let us come down to the xperia mini pro(without the x10)

We have the same great looks, albeit, a little less chrome and some change in the location of the physical keys. Out of the three "required" hardware keys for android phones, only the home key is mechanical, the other two come with capacitive touch.
It is running android 2.3.3( Move apps to sd card(if they are coded to support that feature))
The phone memory is given as 400 MB, But after I installed few default apps, the phone memory remaining was about 250MB. So, I dont think there will be any issue with the number of apps we would install owing to good phone memory and android 2.3.3 apps to sd feature
It has a 5 MP point to focus, face detection, HD video recording
Screen size is 320x480( 3" screen size ). That, IMHO, is perfect.
Multitouch fully enabled with pinch to zoom(courtesy android 2.3.3)
Improved bluetooth functionality
Support for external memory upto 32GB.
DLNA support(courtesy android 2.3.3), Good if you have a playstation3 or other DLNA compliant devices.
The sound quality is nearly the same as was on the x10 mini pro, though a new term has been coined to ride on its excellent sound quality called xLOUD(tm).
The killer feature for me is the widget "type to share". If u are on the home screen with this widget, you just open the keypad and start typing whatever you want to share, without opening any app. Once u have finished typing u just go to options and choose the app through which u want to share twitter, facebook, g+ etc... Fantastic and cool.
The keypad has good feedback but should have been silver in color(like in x10 mini pro). Black keyboard on the black phone made it look monotonous.
We have the 3.5mm audio jack port(At last, somebody put some sense into the handset manufacturers to come out of their propreitory audio out port)
Here we have the same custom UI from sony ericsson with four corners for quick launch of apps.But what is different is that now every corner can house a maximum of 4 shortcuts.
There is a front vga camera for video chat.
Complete flash support, v10.3 avl from the android market(Thanx to android 2.3 and flash being developed on arm v7 and above by adobe)
The core is a 1 GHz, arm v7 processor.

I have to add one negative here. It comes bundled with timed, bull shit, trial applications which cannot be un-installed. I cannot even delete the shortcuts. I firmly believe that these apps should be installed once the user buys the phone and he accepts to install them.

There it is. U have the first hand comparison. I will add further info as I come to know. Thanks to all the android developers(google and more importantly, the independent developers at cyanagenmod) for making android the poor man's smartphone OS.

2 comments:

Nobody can deter me away from "free as in freedom" concept seeded by Sri RMS. See to it that u dont make fun of my belief. If u think otherwise, no need to comment.