Living Down To What A Mini Is ? The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini
Living Down To What A Mini Is ? The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini
Anyone who is familiar with the Robyn, the rumored compact version of the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 circulating in the rumor corridors of the internet mobile community has finally been confirmed at the recently concluded 2010 Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona.
And it comes in two flavours with the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini which is a literal miniaturization of the Xperia 10′s touchscreen monolith, and a tactile QWERTY slider version of the Mini called Mini Pro, as if putting a QWERTY slider already justify slapping a “pro” suffix to it.
The Mini is true to its name being a mini of just about everything superb and outstanding in the X10 which incidentally will be coming to Vodafone UK in April. That’s also being true to Sony tradition of making the markets wait for its high anticipated products. Remember the PS3? Oh, but let’s not get our of the mobile phone industry, perhaps the Satio’s eight-month wait from its announcement in February 2009 is a better example.
A Minimized Feature Set
If anything else, Sony Ericsson creates a new set of handsets that truly defines what a Mini version is. It’s not only mini on the outside, it’s also a mini on the inside. You get a monoblock body that’s 3mm thinner, 7mm narrower, 26mm shorter and weighs a considerable 47g lighter.
Starting with the obvious screen size diminution, you now have a mediocre-sized 2.55-inch TFT capacitive touchscreen with QVGA resolution and a more generous 16 million colors compared the original’s glorious industry-setting 4-inch screen with only 64k colors. You still get the same accelerometer and scratch resistant surface.
Imaging is naturally minimized as well for the gorgeous 8 megapixel on the X10. The mini still has an upscale 5-megappixel autofocus camera with LED Flash and geo tagging, but you won’t get the image stabilization and face/smile detection of the X10. Video recording is not detailed in its press release except to indicate it has video light but could be diminished from the WVGA 30fps video recording of the X10. Otherwise Sony should be bragging about it in its press kit.
Internal memory is pared down from a generous 1GB on the X10 to just 128 MB in the Mini. But you still get microSD expandability of up to 16 GB to make up for it,
All these functional pruning would certainly render a 1 GHz Snapdragon irrelevant which is what Sony did but putting in a less endowed Qualcomm MSM7227 processor clocked at 600 MHz on the Mini. It still runs the same Android 1.6 that most new smartphones have already abandoned in favor of the latest 2.0/2.1 Éclair version.
Standard Features
Other than these, the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini get the standard features like 3G on dual band UMTS, HSDPA/HSUPA, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, microUSB 2.0 for data connectivity options.
You get A-GPS with Google Maps, stereo FM with RDS and a 3.5mm headphone jack. You also get the same Timescape and Mediascape apps, HTML browser, IM and push Email client, Gmail, Google talk and TrackID recognition.