Gadgetory

hey guys jeff arena with pocketnow.com our initial unboxing video of the sony ericsson x10 mini give you a very brief introduction to the custom software and the custom skin that sony's had to overlay on the android operating system on this device in this video we're going to actually give you a better in-depth look at that software and kind of show you what they've done to make it more manageable for the user to allow you to kind of navigate through the operating system and actually use the device itself so let's go ahead and just jump right into that one alright and we are back and I want to take a little time to kind of give you a tour of the x10 mini because Sony really has decided to customize the Android operating system here by more or less putting their own skin which is what we see on a lot of different phones however this skin was designed with the form factor of this device in mind now it is android 1.6 as i have said in the unboxing video basically what we have here are the four corners the top corner is going to be your messaging menu the top right will be your music the bottom left will be your phone in your recent call your call history that sort of thing and the bottom right are your contacts list now but however you can do is you can actually slide this arrow up which will bring you to your main menu so more or less from here you can actually go through and select your different applications such as your browser your camera you can as you can see I have some emails waiting for me right there we can then also continue to scroll over to the right or to the left let's say to also see more of the apps and the icons themselves now you can install apps on this device like any other Android phone as you see there they'll keep going now if I go into my settings here I will actually show you the about phone here so you see here the firmware version is 1.6 and it gives you the build that sort of thing so once again the x10 mini it really does have a customized version of the android OS to really fit this device if we go back to the home screen i will show you actually the messaging application so if we go into here tip up a new message typically you pick a recipient we're not going to do there now we're just going to actually pick the keyboard slot now this is where this device is different from many touchscreen if not all touchscreen the end of Android devices that we've seen this far it does not have a qwerty keyboard as you see here it uses the old style that we were used to once upon a time on our flip phones in fact this phone very much reminds me of a flip phone it's almost like just the screen portion of one of the old style flip phones put into a touchscreen form but as you see here it does give you the old style for the texting once again it is designed with one hand operation in mind then I have to say to be very honest the one-handed texting on this device is very easy you can actually just use my thumb I won't pick it up and block the camera I can actually use my thumb and just pick letters and it's very simple i mean granted it's not as fast as a qwerty keyboard would typically be but it is very simple to actually you know write out a quick sentence or a quick text message here and there when it comes to writing an email a full-length meanwhile i would say probably not going to be the best format because it will take you quite a while but you know simple facebook updates twitter updates that sort of thing i've had no issues whatsoever now we're going to is going to go back to our home screen now we also have the phone dialer icon in the bottom left which will bring you to your dial pad so let's go ahead and press that real quick as you see here we have the typical dial pad just like any other phone if i press this other icon here that will give me my recent call history but I wouldn't really delve into that right now but again very simple to use very clean interface going back to the home screen the top right we'll have our music player which honestly is very impressive it's a very simple music player but the speaker quality the music quality is just phenomenal for the size of this phone I mean it once again I'm pinching this phone and it's very small and it really puts out a lot of sound which I will go over more in depth in my hardware overview going back to the home screen we have of course last not least the contacts list in the bottom right corner I won't jump into that right now because that's quite extensive and shares people's information now as I previously mentioned you can actually swipe up here to access the typical grid menu system however they've also incorporated widgets which allow you to actually swipe left and right to access different screens to see your widgets real surprise here guys there's this is actually twenty screens that you can actually wipe through now granny you are typically limited to one widget per screen but I've actually done 20 pages before it's told me that I cannot do anymore as you can see I'm repeating a lot of them because i do not have 20 different widgets to show you but it actually will in fact do 20 different screens here and it's still running pretty quickly I mean with a few of them being google latitude and that sort of thing but i would say it's definitely not there we go it's not holding the device back too much at all so i mean in reality that's going to allow you to quickly access many of the key apps or the key widgets you're going to use it on a daily basis without limitation at all so in this part one of our software overview of the sony ericsson xperia x10 mini we've gone ahead and show you the custom skin that Sony has overlaid on top of the Android operating system to allow for easy one-handed operation and navigation through the small screen as you can see here in our next video we're going to go into more depth of the hardware and then following the hardware overview we're also going to go into more depth of some of the applications on this device itself including a browser test and looking at some of these social networking aspects as well as some of the gaming application so as always please give us a thumbs up leave us your comments and stay tuned for more thanks for watching everyone