Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon minimun from pocketnow.com and this is the software tour part 1 of the sony ericsson xperia x1 now the reason that I'm doing this in two parts is because there's a lot to talk about in the first part which is right now I'm going to talk all about the panel's and how they actually work and then in the second part we're gonna talk about the programs and the settings and all those sort of things that we normally talk about so let's start off I'm going to turn on the turn on the device and what you'll notice is that the screen will actually fade on which is a very nice touch kind of like the HTC touch diamond2 and the touch pro and what you see here right now is actually a panel it's the standard Windows Mobile today's screen panel ok so let me try to explain this to you in Windows Mobile you have the today's screen obviously you probably know that which shows you your next appointment and your tasks and your unread messages and all that sort of thing then if you want to get to a program you go to start and you go to programs and then go from there pretty much right well Sony Ericsson is kind of changing the way that we think about Windows Mobile with the panel interface the idea is that the date the Today screen becomes a platform for programs to run so you can have interactive content or other little interesting animated bits on your today's screen kind of like an active desktop now the reason you would want that is because I think the idea is that your today's screen is what you see when you turn on your phone and if you can do something else with that beyond the standard you know Windows Mobile today's screen that could be a really compelling offering so let me show you some of these panels that we can use to access the panels we just press on the panel button here and here they are you get nine panels you can add more panels although right now there are very very few panels I think they're about two extra I'll talk about all of the panels soon and if you rotate the device to landscape you will get a nice little animation that seems a little bit choppy but I don't I don't think it is it's kind of pauses in the middle but I think it's supposed to now we can choose a panel either by tapping on it with our finger or we can use the optical joystick to move around and you get this little sound so let's just go down the list to the different panels and I'll explain what each of them does so I'm gonna start off with this one and it takes a minute and what happens is that you get a picture of the panel and then it actually becomes active and the top and bottom windows mobile bar comes back so this panel I've configured a little bit I have the the weather up here 48 degrees in Philadelphia I have the pocketnow.com RSS feed right here and the all shadow comm RSS feed so this is a pretty useful panel for me during the daytime when I want to monitor the sites and see what's what's been posted we can change a lot of different things about this and by the way I also have my next calendar appointments listed right here if we go into options from here we can change the color scheme we can change the clock we can change the city if we go over to web feeds that's where you enter in the RSS feeds that you want to monitor on your todays screen which is pretty cool if you think about it and over here on the right side is launcher which dictates which buttons you have to launch your various programs you can add some speed dial entries and that sort of thing so that is the second panel it's pretty useful for during the day time when you have a lot of work to do let's go back to the panel interface and by the way I should mention you can change the view of the panel interface by pressing this button here and then you get this kind of shuffle view we can slide your finger or or I'm using my stylus and I think I clicked on one there let's go back in there so can use your finger to kind of shuffle through them as if they were a bunch of cards so let's go to the next one this is the this is the fish panel and I'm gonna have to read off of a piece of paper the instructions that come with it to explain what this does so if you look at this fish right here this this black one it's called the Demick and the fishes color will actually turn red when the battery goes below 10% so that's pretty cool if you look at this fish down here that's called a walk in and the fish's color is silver when the sound is turned off so let me turn the sound off and you'll see that guy turn silver no see there it goes turned silver the other fish which which just came off the screen this one right here is an indicator when there is an unread message and you can see at the top of the screen I've got a little mailbox and there's another fish that's not on the screen that will come on the screen if I have a missed call so this is kind of useful and it's got you know if you touch on the screen the fish will actually come towards your finger or your stylus so it's a bit of a novelty this may be good for the weekend when you don't really care about you know reading RSS feeds or something like that and you just want to see the time and the date and see if you have a missed call okay so let's go to the next panel I'm going to press the panel button there and I'm going to go back to the other panel view because I like it a lot better I can see them all and we're gonna go to this one over here now this is a second version of the panel you saw with the RSS feed on it although you can customize it differently so here I have two calendars set up for October November I also have recent programs I have my calendar so again this may be a good panel to have when you're traveling and you want to be able to schedule dates easily by looking at two calendars at once I don't know trying to make things up here when you may actually use them you can change the color scheme these are the exact same options as the ones that we looked at before so you can have two panels doing the same things just set up a little bit differently okay let's go back into the panels okay the next panel is super cool to the multimedia panel which basically puts an entire multimedia program right on your todays screen and it really reminds me of Windows Media Center I'm going to use my finger here so I can flick my finger I can go music video pictures hopefully you can see that let me zoom in a little bit I'm gonna go to videos so video and I'm going to scroll down to that and I'm gonna go to this one and then where it's going to play a video and of course the sound is off so we could demonstrate the fish the fish panel but if you tap on the screen you kind of get iPod like controls and we can go back or we can change the volume and let me let me turn on the sound so that we can hear and I'll go to a different video or actually I'll go to the same video very very good video quality with this 800 by 480 screen it's very beautiful okay so let me show you the other bits of the multimedia pane because there is more to see so we can go back quite easily by clicking on the left side of the screen here we can go to let's go to pictures and we could go to the pictures on my storage card and this takes a little bit of time it'll show you a thumbnail of all the pictures but after the thumbnails loads it gets a little bit faster and you can flick your finger up to kind of scroll through them and to select a picture you just tap on it and then if we press play we get a photo slideshow a really nice looking photo slideshow this is beautiful beading in and out and everything okay let's stop that I tap on the screen and press the back button very very finger friendly the screen is super-sensitive it's working quite well so let's go back here to music and we can go to albums and let's go to this one we get album art and you can continue to work on your device while this music is playing so I can go into programs you know that sort of thing really neat really neat let's see if there's anything else that I wanted to show you in the multimedia application we can also go to games although we're not going to cover that and in settings we can make a few small changes to to this multimedia panel we can change the background and have it be animated so if you watch that now you can see little little icons floating around the screen just a cool little effect alright so that is the multimedia panel very well done it's a fantastic media application let's go back into the panels and continue okay here is the FM radio panel it's not a program on the Xperia it's actually a panel and in order to get this to work I need to get my headset so I'm going to do that up here and I'm going to switch it on and it works really well you can do you can do presets you can change the volume use the speaker or the headphones so it's really robust easy to use FM radio program okay let's go back into the panels and let's go to the Google panel this is pretty neat what it does is it puts a Google search right on your today's screen and it also gives you links to things on the bottoms like Google Maps Google Mail Calendar photos these three icons here will take you to pocket Internet Explorer or opera whereas the one on the Left will open the Google Maps mobile application I'll do that now comes up very fast and so from here you can search Google and I was thinking to myself is this actually faster than just going to start Internet Explorer favorites Google and typing in something well you just heard all the steps to do that yes it is faster to switch to a panel press the panel press the Google and start typing that some one or two less steps than going the long way so it's a it's an it's a needed pane and I think it'll it'll help a lot of people do faster Google searches so let's go back into the panels and over here we have the SPB show you may have read in the news maybe on pocket now that SPB has made a panel for the x1 customers for free and basically what we have here is SBB mobile shell for free a thirty dollar program for free if you have an x1 and I love mobile shell because it has gesture support so you can swipe your finger to change the panel on the left here we have programs we can we can quickly quickly get into the internet favorites by by going through this it has very awesome animations multimedia support so you can quickly get to that kind of thing and it has settings so you can change all the animations if you want to turn them off and then if we go to the center button here we get the current temperature plus we get notification alert so if we have any email new SMS new cause they'll show up here we also get the next list of calendar appointments that are on the roster and below that is a nice calendar if you want to reference the day of the week and to the right we have favorite people so that we can dial by just clicking on their picture or send them a text message easily that way so this is a free panel and it's basically a thirty dollar program very good let's go back into the back into the panel menu and finally we have this last one that I downloaded from the panel website it's really crappy it's basically just a viewer for your photos it's really a waste of a panel because you can just use the multimedia panel to do this or you can just go straight into or you can just go straight into my pictures okay to change a panel you open up the panel interface and you click this one in the bottom right corner and then you choose the panel that you want to change so I'm going to choose this one and click in the center again and then we get a list of all of our panels and we can scroll down and we could choose one that we want to replace that one or if we want to get more panels we'd click more panels here at the top and we are taken to a sony ericsson website let me show you the panels that are out there now it may be tough to see we have a - wire panel which would be pretty cool if you use - wire it's a very very cool program second up we have SBB mobile shell which we've already used the third one is cool hunting which is a panel that doesn't work it I don't even know what it does but when I try to load it nothing happens and on the bottom here we have slide show panel which is the same thing that you saw earlier with a slideshow of the pictures and that's really it there are no other panels right now and it would be great if there were additional panels of course and one thing I want to mention before I sign off all of the panels actually work really well in landscape they're made to work in landscape so here we have that blue one that I showed you earlier and if I flip it over to landscape it'll reorient itself so that I can see everything and there it is so what do I think of the panel interface well to be honest I really like it I think it's a great idea to get rich content on your today screen unfortunately right now the selection of panels is painfully limited to just a few but I think at the developer community and brain as this whole idea the x1 could have a lot of really really cool panels that that make interacting with the device a really great experience next up we're going to talk about all the programs and settings included in the x1 in the next video so look out for that we'll be back with more suit