Sony-Ericsson publishes XPERIA X1 white paper! Wowz!

[Guest Menneisyys]

I’ve published several articles on Sony Ericsson’s forthcoming Windows Mobile device, the XPERIA X1. Up until now, little had been known of the capabilities of the phone. Now, the S-E folks have just published a white paper, which answers several (but not all!) questions.

It is available HERE for download as a PDF document. (Just enter the anti-denial of service four characters in the input field for access.) The best news is that, according to InfoSyncWorld, it’s coming in August 2008 – that is, earlier than most have thought.

Some of the most interesting stuff the old, MWC / CEBIT leaflets / presentations didn’t provide an answer to and/or could have been improved upon the first prototypes:

- it has a TFT LCD, NOT an OLED screen (some people stated it’d have OLED)

- it seems to have a traditional D-pad in addition to the touchpad if and only if "Four way key - to navigate menus" (see page 7) is what this means. Very good news for most people (see my generic remarks on the issue in my i780 article on touchpads.)

- the camera has both auto-focus and touch focus touch focus. The latter allows for quick focusing on the object you press on the touchscreen - clearly a clever way of focusing to out-of-focus subjects as quickly as possible. However, it seems it won’t have lens protection, unlike the Nokia N95 / N82 (the current top-end Smartphone camera model) and, generally, seems to be weaker.

- as far as the video recording capabilities are concerned, the video size (resolution) and frame rate are VGA and 30 fps, respectively for the non-US model; for the US model, this is QVGA and 24 fps only. Frankly, I just don’t get the point in so severely a dumbed down US model... Did the Sony people go crazy?! Not that I would except Nokia quality shots from the camera (no lens protector and the lens itself seems to be pretty weak), but 30 fps VGA is, today, a MUST in any decent smartphone; therefore, I just don’t understand why they plan to release a device for the US market with such specs. (Nevertheless, I’m absolutely sure some hackers / ROM cookers will be able to enable the American model to operate in VGA mode – if nothing else works, by flashing an European ROM on it.)

- it supports ("Media sharing is compatible with DLNA." on page 6) DLNA (see THIS), which is the first on Windows Mobile (unless you use a DLNA-compatible client). See my UPnP Bible for more info on it.

- it, in addition to the worldwide 3G bands, also supports most (but not all, as it's only tri-band) of the US 3G bands (but, of course, not the forthcoming, absolutely incompatible T-Mobile one); that is, most people in the US will get HSDPA coverage with either bands. This is definitely good news.

- according to page 27, the US version doesn’t support H.264 playback either. (See the H.264 Bible for more info.) Interestingly, the non-US version supports the H.264 Baseline profile.

- according to Page 26, the built-in music player supports eAAC+; that is, HE-AACv2. (I REALLY hope Sony didn’t mess up with the different versions in here.) This means the music player will be something much better than the built-in WMP in Windows Mobile 6 Professional, which doesn’t support this format. (See THIS for more info on this question.) At last some good news for us HE-AACv2 fans using Windows Mobile devices – I may even stop using my N95 as a HE-AACv2 player? ;-)

Note that

- it’s still not known whether it will have 3D hardware acceleration or not. Page 4, which is almost the same as the one in the original MWC leaflet, only lists “HW 3D Graphics” and, unlike most? all? the other list elements, it’s not elaborated on later either. There's a related remark ("3D fish Panel: A cool panel which will showcase the 3D features of the phone (A fish tank with 3D fishes).") on page 6, which MIGHT mean it indeed has hardware acceleration. Again, it is still to be seen whether it's true and whether it has hardware acceleration or not.

- it’s not known whether the built-in MIDlet manager supports Java 3D or not (see “N/A” in the Java 3D row on page 27). Given that the latest, 3.1+ Esmertec Jbed versions all support Java 3D (so far, without hardware acceleration because of the lacking Qualcomm drivers on HTC’s own phones), this MIGHT mean it uses either a non-Esmertec MIDlet manager or a non-3D-capable one. (Not that it’d be hard to install the latest Jbed on it... Still, it might not have support for the 3D hardware acceleration, if any – unlike, say, the Nokia N95 / N82, where hardware accelerated 3D games work just great.) (See the MIDlet Bible for more info.)