racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

SonyEricsson’s local PR lent me an Xperia X8 to test drive for a few weeks. So far, I’m liking the phone. It’s a midrange Android phone at a reasonable price (PhP 11,600). The size is somewhere in between a candybar phone and the bigger Xperia X10.

The phone has a 3-inch capacitive touchscreen with a 320×480 resolution, a 3-megapixel fixed-focus camera, 600 MHz processor, 160MB of internal storage, up to 32 GB SDHC storage, and a whole lot of Android goodness.

The phone is white, but a black Xperia X8 is reported to be coming soon.

My only gripe at this point is that it only comes with Android 1.6 (Donut), whereas most Android phones these days come with Eclair (2.1) or FroYo (2.2). SonyEricsson promises an upgrade sometime before the year ends, so I’m hoping that’s sometime soon.

I’ll post a full review soon.

I recently got a review unit of SonyEricsson’s latest Xperia X1 smartphone, and I plan to review the gadget one day at a time. In the meantime, here are a few unboxing photos. Please feel free to click and view the larger images.

The Xperia X1 will be launched locally on November 28th. Pricing is yet to be announced, but tentatively, it could be anywhere from PhP 40,000 to PhP 45,000, based on the current exchange rates. Retail price elsewhere is about $900.

Smartphones are not exactly alien to me. My main mobile phone is my Nokia E51, which runs the Symbian Series 60 v3 operating system. The X1 is my first ever touchscreen and QWERTY phone, though, so it does come with a learning curve. Also, the X1 runs Windows Mobile 6.1. The latest Windows-powered Smartphone I used was the “Tanager” by HTC, or which was more commonly known in the Philippines as the “Smart Amazing Phone” running Smartphone 2002.

I’ll be writing about my experiences and observations in a series of posts through the next couple of weeks.

Some impressions of the Xperia at Jayvee‘s and Abe‘s blogs.