Sony Ericsson’s inaugural Android device, originally thought to be named Rachael, then the Xperia X3, has now been officially unveiled as the Xperia X10. The official spec sheet reveals that the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 comes with some high powered features such as a 4.0-inch scratch-resistant touchscreen and an 8.1-megapixel camera with 16x digital zoom, autofocus and LED flash.
What’s interesting about the Xperia X10 is that it comes with similar features to the Motorola Milestone, such as turn-by-turn navigation and aggregated communications, but it’s running on Android 1.6 (Donut) and not Android 2.0 (Eclair). It looks as though the Xperia X10 will ship with a free trial version of Sony Ericsson’s Wisepilot software, which features turn-by-turn directions, although it also appears that availability of this service will be limited.
The X10 also comes with something called Timescape, perhaps best thought of as Sony Ericsson’s answer to Motorola’s Motoblur. Timescape pulls all of your communication options under one umbrella, email, status updates, tweets etc. There’s also an ingenious sounding face-recognition tool which recognizes and automatically tags your friends after the first time you tag a picture of them. This allows you to easily assign pictures to your contacts, allowing you to call up friends simply by tapping their picture. Clicking on the the upper right corner of a picture will bring up a list of all the contact options you have for that person, SMS, email, Facebook, Twitter, etc – something which Sony Ericsson are calling Infinite Content.
Perhaps confusingly, it seems that the Rachael tag hasn’t been entirely dropped. Instead of using the standard Android skin as seen on phones such as the HTC Magic, Sony Ericsson has designed it’s own skin which it is apparently calling Rachael, perhaps in homage to the movie Blade Runner. Given that the name is now familiar with customers it’s possible that we might see this phone marketed as the Rachael Xperia X10 or X10 Rachael. Whatever the phone is eventually called, it’ll be a while yet before the Sony Ericsson unleash it on the public. The current ETA is set for early next year, which could be any time from early January to the end of March.
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