Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro

So I've owned at least 1 mobile phone since the turn of the century, starting off with a phone that was approximately half the size of my forearm and cried when I dared to save over 10 texts, right up to today and my Google Nexus S, which almost begs for more to be done with it, at one time I had my X10 Mini Pro, and to be honest I wish I'd gone for something else.

When my old iPhone 3G finally bit the bullet, it was time to go shopping for a replacement that would be cheap and cover me the remaining 10 months of contract, and several people in several phone shops convinced me the X10 Mini Pro was for me. Small to hold onto, but with a keyboard to make typing easier it seemed perfect.

But onto the phone itself, personally for me a phone has to do the basics of making calls and sending texts, have enough in the way of games and/or programs to keep me entertained whilst on long journeys and preferably store a decent stash of my music, at first glance you'd expect the Mini X10 Pro to tick all the needed boxes, your calls and texts are simplistic enough, it works on the android operating system meaning that you can download plenty of applications to pass the time and with a micro-sd slot, there should probably be plenty of ease in downloading music on to your phone. However as earlier mentioned there are several issues with the phone, so lets see what it can do shall we?

Battery Life

This was my first big issue with the phone, at times I'll be leaving the house at 6am and not getting back in till gone 7pm, so I'm going to need the phone to keep a decent life throughout the day, however regularly I'd find it was close to dead by 4pm if not earlier. Granted if I was using the phone a lot during the day, then I'd expect it to drain, but this was from it being sat idle in my pocket. On returning this to the retailer and asking for them to look at it I was informed that this is a regular issue with the phone 'because its a smartphone', funny that as I have a smartphone now, as does the wife, and neither of us have ever had that kind of issue with any smartphone before, so I'd have to put that down as a negative aspect of the phone.

Build of the Phone.

This was a real worry to me, the phone itself regularly felt like it was going to fall apart in my hands, it just didn't feel that securely put together. Then there was the keyboard, this is one of the big selling points of the handset, now I have quite large fingers but the amount of times I was attempting to press a button and something else appeared on screen verged on ridiculous, which leads me onto the process of pressing the keys as well, at times the keys would stick which would regularly lead to a cccccccccccccccc on the screen, or the complete opposite, you'd have to hammer some keys to get them to work, which with the flimsy feeling never filled me with confidence.

Then there's the screen itself, which doesn't seem that clear when using it, throw in that as the phone is a touch-screen phone you'd expect the screen to be quite sensitive to touch and quite sturdy as well, but unfortunately its the exact opposite, you need to give the screen a good whack to get the phone to recognize your touch and then you're still struggling to be confident as you can actually feel the screen it against the phone underneath it.

Functionality

The one area where you want a phone to excel, and my X10 didn't – to secure the phone I used to have a pattern style key lock on the screen (i.e. 9 dots where you draw a shape to unlock the phone) and mine was a 7 dot combination, this would be a great security feature if it wasn't for the fact that it would automatically close the screen down by the time I'd hit dot 4.

Then there's the android system itself, the phone comes with version 1.6 pre-installed and can be upgraded to 2.1 which sounds good as Android is only currently up to version 2.3 however it's still an issue with this handset, main reason being that 1.6 is just a poor, poor operating system and the phone itself doesn't seem to be able to handle 2.1, when its installed everything seems to slow down when realistically you'd expect it to speed up. But its not just the phone that slows down, the apps that you've downloaded seem to slow down as well, making a game that you could just about play become unplayable due to the screen freezing up repeatedly and everything slowing down.

Music Player

This was one of the biggest reasons that I got the phone, I was told that the music-player was comparable to the iPhone's, how wrong that was.

The only part I'd say the music player trumps the iPhone's is in getting music onto your phone, you don't have to rely on the abhorrent iTunes to upload your music, quite literally you pop your sd-card into the provided dongle, plug it into your computer and then drag and drop any music you want to play, however that's where the advantages end, the actual Music sounds tinny no matter what you do to the settings, there isn't any way to set up a play list of certain tracks for different situations, if you dare to use any headphones other than the ones provided then you'll struggle to hear the music at all and the headphones themselves are awful and feel akin to stuffing pins in your ears.

Standard Features (aka Phone Calls and Texts)

Again this isn't anything to shout about, Phone-Call wise the phone regularly seems to take a while to register that you're wanting to make a call, and even then it wouldn't be the first time that the phone rang the wrong person. Then once you're on the call the phone itself doesn't sound clear enough and I found myself regularly asking people to repeat themselves on calls.

Texting wise, it does the same as any other phones, although they do seem to take up a large amount of memory of the phone if you want to save the messages for any reason.

Over-all I wouldn't recommend this phone, it just seems that its trying to be something that it isn't, if it was aimed more at the low-end of the market then I might rate it higher but as it is, I can't find anything in it to say it'd be any good for anyone.