Sony Ericsson Embraces Android With Xperia X10 Smartphone

Sony Ericsson has officially launched the Xperia X10, formerly known as the X3 or Rachael, a smartphone that is the first device build by the company using Google's Android platform.

(ed: no confusion here with the X10 Wireless Security Cameras ads that flooded the net a few years ago) Just like HTC with its Sense user interface, Sony Ericsson has chosen to overlay the default Android UI with a new touchscreen user interface which it calls the UX platform and will provide "unrivalled" integration of "social media services" - think Facebook, Twitter, MSN and will allow the phone's users to "truly humanise the way people interact with their phones".

One executive vice president of Sony Ericsson, Rikko Sakaguchi, said in a statement that "With the X10, we are raising the bar we have set ourselves with entertainment-rich phones like Aino and Satio by making communication more fun and playful, multiplying and enriching opportunities to connect.”

The Satio and the Aino were two Symbian-based smartphones that were released back in October but aim at a slightly less upmarket audience compared to the X10 which will be the flagship model in Sony Ericsson's 2010 range of devices.

The phone comes with a 8.1-megapixel camera with a 18-times digital Zoom, LED Flash and autofocus, WiFi and HSDPA 3G, a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset, A-GPS and will be available in black or white.

There's no Android 2.0 unfortunately, which means that we'd have to stick with the version 1.6 for the time being. Possibly the single most stunning feature of the phone is its 4-inch capacitive touch display that's capable of showing 854x480 pixels, making by far the smartphone with the highest pixel count.