Sony Ericsson X10 Mini Pro: Little Victories

We’re ancient enough here at P4u Towers to remember a time when phones were massive. Your average handset was the size of a brutalist council block and almost as featureless, and you were lucky if it weighed less than a cement mixer. Then, as the unstoppable march of progress thundered on, handset manufacturers did their darnedest to out do each other, trying to make the smallest handsets possible, often resulting in teeny-tiny phones that looked like they should have come free inside a Kinder egg and which required a magnifying glass to help you locate and poke at the buttons. Nokia 8210 anyone?

Jump forward a decade and the trend has gone full circle with the advent of the all singing, all dancing, web-enabled, multi-media, nuclear-powered, ultra-intuitive HD, 3-D Touch-screen, sentient handsets capable of human emotion that we see today. This is all very well and good you may think, but the things have got a bit bulbous again, so much so that the term handset seems a bit fatuous unless you have hands the size of shovels.

If they get any bigger, they’ll start shipping them with specially designed harnesses with which you can strap the Olympic swimming pool sized gadgets to your person to make using them easier. High-end mobiles will come with their own phone butler – an implausibly posh elderly gentleman called Bartleby or Wadsworth whose sole purpose will be to liberate the giant vibrating clump of plastic from your pocket as it chirrups into life and then lift it to your spittle-flecked jabbering gob. They’ll even wipe the touch-screen free of unsightly finger-smears for a small fee.

Once, just once, we wish that phone makers would reign in their excessive tendencies, stop trying to prove that bigger is better and actually knock up a smartphone that does smartphone stuff but isn’t the size of an aircraft carrier. Step forward Sony Ericsson…

Yes, the Japanese/Swedish alliance has managed to crow-bar loads of features into a swish compact package with the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini Pro. In essence, the phone is no different than the earlier Xperia X10 Mini, only this time; they’ve managed to chuck in a slide-out Qwerty keyboard.

When you think about it, this is quite an amazing feat considering the size of the phone – measuring just 52 by 90 by 17mm when closed. The keyboard tucks away nicely but does make the X10 Mini Pro a bit of a chunky little blighter, but not obtrusively so. You can stick it in your pocket without worrying if people will keep asking if you’re pleased to see them.

We’d even go as far to say that the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini Pro is even easier to use than the X10 Mini as a result of an actual ‘hardware’ keyboard, although we’re well aware that everyone likes to get a bit touchy-screeny these days. Never fear though, for the Mini Pro also has a virtual keyboard accessible from the minuscule screen (although it’s smaller and fiddlier than a 1″ violinist).

The hefty amount of social-networking apps that are available for Android, coupled with the phone’s swift connectivity, makes the physical keyboard a helpful addition for those of you who like to be permanently wired to the web, tapping away updating statuses and tweeting what you’ve had for your dinner.

Inside this chocolate brownie-sized chunk of technology is a slightly disappointing OS – Android 1.6. This slightly older version doesn’t noticeably affect the functionality of the phone but does mean that features found in later versions of Google’s OS, such as built-in support for Exchange email and pinch-to-zoom, are absent.

Despite its diminutive stature, Sony Ericsson hasn’t sacrificed usability for dinky-ness. The small screen is easy to navigate around with four shortcuts (Dialling/Media/Contacts/Messaging) placed in the corners of each of the home screens, and neatly designed, reasonably sized icons allowing even the meatiest of digits to dance around the various screens without any problem.

As if this wasn’t enough, Sony Ericsson have had the foresight to make the phone ultra-customisable with the option to tack widgets to each of the many homescreens, providing access to apps and other functions such as organiser, call histories and pretty much whatever else you want to assign.

Text messaging doesn’t present a challenge whether you’re using the flip-out QWERTY keyboard or the virtual keyboard and the multi-media aspects of the phone are up to scratch, although viewing video on the tiny screen is a bit underwhelming unless you happen to a be a Borrower. Android Market provides access to all kinds of useful apps with the staple fare of Google Maps, Talk and Mail thrown in alongside music identification tool TrackID. A more than adequate 5MP camera tops off this minuscule marvel.

Overall, the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini Pro is a handset that packs all the punch of its larger smartphone counterparts (give or take a few slices of functionality) and is surprisingly pleasurable to use. Whilst it perhaps isn’t a good idea to shell out on one if you like to use your phone primarily as a media consumption tool, the X10 Mini offers a neatly-packaged alternative to those humongous glossy slabs of tech we call smartphones.