Mobile Price

Xperia X8 Specs and Price - Sony Ericsson has had a bit of a topsy turvy time featuring a Android phones over the years. Its first few attempts, including this Xperia X1 along with Xperia X10, didn't quite obtain the balance right though the X10 mini along with X10 mini expert both impressed us and were intriguing options if you were buying a particularly small cellular phone.

The company's most current attempt, then, could be the Xperia X8. It sits somewhere within the X10 minuscule and full-size X10 with regards to size, making for the small-but-not-tiny Android smart dataphone. It's also relatively inexpensive only £130, or no cost on £15pm agreements.

The X8's design can be a tough one to help nail down. It's clearly not by far the most elegant device going and its plastic construction absolutely makes itself identified. However, it feels sound and well put together, and has a specific charm. If colour's your current thing, you'll be pleased to know the backplate is available in a number of thereof, though the leading remains pearlescent white whichever you ultimately choose.

Where perhaps the unit most prominently demonstrates its budget orientation could be the front and more specifically the tv screen. The markedly greyish (rather than black) along with plastic 3in rectangular shape is slightly recessed into the bezel, which slighty hinders usability. The bezel is usually rather wide, making the tv screen appear smaller than it actually is.

Otherwise, the general hardware in the X8 is rather impressive. The three buttons beneath screen are responsive and easily distinguished as you move the sides are household to more features than you would possibly expect at this specific price.

Up top you will find there's microUSB socket (underneath any somewhat annoying plastic material flap), the power/screen fastener button, and headphone socket that is certainly compatible with Sony Ericsson's inline headphones – thus this odd shape. A headset that provides reasonable quality sound and decent noise isolation also comes in the box however it isn't actually in the aforementioned Sony Ericsson exclusive type.

The left along with bottom edges are without the need for features but around the right is any volume rocker along with, joy of pleasures, a shutter button to the camera. Finally, there's the digital camera itself that sits around the back, sadly lacking LED flash to help accompany it.

Turn the X8 with and, though somewhat without contrast and punchiness of colour, the tv screen looks rather nice. With 320 times 480 pixels stuffed into its 3in framework, it's sharp and may fit a surprising number of detail in and viewing angles are very good too.

Nonetheless, there's no getting away from the size limit. Clearly it's not planning to be the best choice for watching online video but most crucially this onscreen keyboard undergoes. It actually appears to be a combination of the dimensions of the screen and its sensitivity (or don't have thereof) but, no matter, it doesn’t spark a great typing expertise. We reckon all of us were typing at considerably less the speed all of us normally would to get a reasonably accurate answer, and even then it had been still more problem prone than we would like.

What makes up because of this issue, however, is which you have a surprisingly potent, fully-fledge Android smartphone close at hand so browsing the internet, checking your mail, finding your method, and playing games are typical activities that this specific phone is surprisingly great at. What's more, Wif-Fi, GPS DEVICE, a digital compass, and 3G are typical onboard so you are not left wanting for these core functions.

With only any 600MHz CPU (as against the 1GHz+ chips used in most larger rivals) along with 168MB of RAM (512MB is more established on larger phones) note of, it's not this fastest phone going but a lot of games still work and due to Sony Ericsson's screen tweaks, the cellular phone feels reasonably nippy. Start running a great deal of apps at once and yes it does start to decelerate – indeed period of time amount of RAM means these slow downs begin working earlier than the majority of devices – nevertheless this didn't occur so frequently as to be a significant annoyance, and if it does happen you possibly can just close this offending app.

The location where the interface tweaks tend to be most noticeable is around the homescreen. Gone could be the option to increase multiple grids of shortcuts for your favourite apps to get replaced by simply just four shortcuts: a single in each spot. These can be easily customised and you can access other apps by depressing the menu button or swiping up wards but it's obviously a lttle bit limiting.

Filling the centre in the screen can possibly be nothing or you can include a single widget Swipe left and right and you can add multiple even more widgets (we got up to 11 before providing up).

As using the X10 mini along with X10 mini expert these changes makes navigating the tiny screen that easier, so the limits don't feel too restrictive. However, as you move the X10 minis seemed very much more worthy in the compromise, due to their particularly small sizing, the X8 is just not quite small plenty of. Its squat style means it only really comes with a advantage in peak over much larger-screened products. At 54mm extensive, it's little narrower when compared with most, and the 15mm thickness is positively tubby. Having said that, it's also really worth remembering that this can be a budget phone approximately anything else.

The Xperia X8 runs the 2. 1 version of Android, which is two iterations behind the most up-to-date available version. You still get every one of the really core functionality though so must not be left wanting for excessive. A number in the standard apps have been modified anyway to better fit the cramped screen.

Contacts are displayed inside a long list – together with five names size onscreen at any one time – which may be a bit of a pain to scroll through with all this version of Android's a little bit stuttery scrolling. Online community integration is backed, via Sony Ericsson's Timescape app but the profile pictures aren't shown on the main contact checklist. Click through with a contact, however, and you may see the individuals latest picture with the rest of their particular info – bizarrely, this favourites page merely shows pictures together with picture-less contacts found as silhouettes. Tap the Facebook icon for any contact and you may go through on their profile, or engage the Timescape (infinity) symbol and their Timescape account is shown.

Timescape is Sony Ericsson's social networking app that brings together Facebook and Myspace feeds into a single stream of details. You can convey a Timescape widget for the homescreen and just search the timeline pictures leisure. Tap an update and you will be taken fully app so you'll be able to reply. It's quite a good simple addition that makes maintaining your social networks that little easier but this silly virtual card interface in the main timelines might do with simplifying.

Meanwhile, the dialler, which is limited to only the dialler in addition to recent calls checklist, works fine but does not have intelligent contact matching so that you always have in order to type out the complete number.

Standard apps pertaining to Facebook and Myspace don't come installed however, you can download them from your market place and they work surprisingly well on the smallish screen. Certainly, most normal Market apps should work fine within this device, assuming they're not too demanding in the CPU speed.

SMS messages are generally well handled by a simple interface in which keeps messages set up by contact for easily tracking conversations However email doesn't hold up quite so properly There's no option but to own it try in addition to squash whatever email you're viewing in a narrow column which makes HTML emails go all over the place. And with no option to zoom in in addition to out, you're stuck scrolling around trying to find where its randomly decided to put the a variety of graphical elements. That is a shame, as it's or else a reasonably nice to utilize interface.

The net browser lacks little to zoom however otherwise does an excellent job of adequately rendering full website pages with the onscreen controls (or double tap) pertaining to zooming working quite nicely. Considering the sluggish CPU, it's reasonably nippy at the same time, though you can guarantee that in case and when Adobe Adobe flash support arrives it will destroy performance.

Tweaks have been made to this Picture, Music and Online video players/viewers with all three refined with the small screen. The improvements are all minor, they all actually improve experience, though the online video media player is very limited both due to the slow processor and deficit of format support.

All of those other usual Google features are mixed together and correct together with GoogleMaps and GoogleNavigation again appearing surprisingly reactive.

It may well use a shutter button however otherwise the 3-megapixel video camera is something of disappointment. It is deficient in autofocus, has simply no flash, struggles to pick up much detail, and is also not up in order to much in dim situations. In its favour, it does at least produce reasonably organic looking colours without any obvious lens distortions. Yet again, it's worth noting that this is technically some sort of budget camera, however, so one can't be too disappointed.

Regarding video, it's standard explanation only and suffers the same general limitations since stills but or else it produces smooth looking video which is perfectly watchable thanks to its 30fps.

One thing you may not expect to find in that cheap phone is really a microSD slot however find one you do here. It will take cards up to 16GB using a 2GB card in the box, and with merely 128MB of onboard memory you will likely want to upgrade this sooner rather than later. Also under the backplate will be the 1200mAh battery, which we found relatively lacking, at least with all the phone in its default state. Doing the settings in addition to turning off computerized updates for Timescape meant we could get two days use out of a single demand, up from a day or less together with automatic updates remaining on.

Finally we come to call quality and also you probably won't always be too surprised in order to here this smallish mobile phone doesn't set just about any new records. It is simply adequate pertaining to both earpiece in addition to speaker calls.

The Sony Ericsson Xperia X8 is within some ways quite an impressive device. It has every one of the features of some sort of fully-fledged smartphone yet is smaller in addition to considerably cheaper as compared to most. However, it somehow isn't going to quite all bond with it currently being compromised on functionality yet not smaller enough to vindicate being so. It may not be bad, just not brilliant, and you will discover better cheap Android smartphones in existence.