Przedstawiciel PLAY LUBLIN

So Sony Ericsson just scraped into their “end of October” window last Sunday by forcing out just one regional version of their unfeasibly long awaited Eclair 2.1 update for the Xperia X10. Since then everyone else has been hanging on waiting for their own region to get the new firmware.

Well today the update has arrived in the only place that matters, where I live! The UK Generic kit was released earlier this morning and my phone detected it around 09:00. As the update is a full reflash it needs to be done via a computer so I went to connect to PC Companion only to be told that I already had the latest version, SEUS also did the same. By 09:30 SEUS finally acknowledged the existence of the update which my phone had already told me about and the new firmware was installed without a hitch, only taking a few minutes.

First impressions are, it’s much the same and not worth 12 months in waiting but that’s probably being unfair. The update is more a collection of improvements and less embarrassment than sweeping changes, here are the things you will notice:

• The previously attractive lock screen is gone, replaced with a lightly skinned version of the default Android 2.1 screen.
• The whole custom blue skin is darker, fading to black at the lower part of the screen.
• 5 homescreens with 5 rows & 4 columns of icons/widgets.
• The SE keyboard is completely different with both positive and negative changes (more on this later).
• Video camera supports “720p HD”, if you expect to see anything resembling actual HDTV quality from this, prepare to be disappointed.
• Social phonebook with profile pic updates, note that these don’t overwrite manually set images so you will need to delete those.
• Messaging app has been given a pleasing facelift.
• Android Market up to date.
• Eclair exchange email support removed! “Enjoy” the commercial bloatware that is Moxier instead!

So what about the signature features that are Timescape and mediascape? Well, so far I can see very little difference if I’m honest.

Timescape is still not as fast as it needs to be, requires too many presses to do anything useful and STILL doesn’t support Gmail. I will continue to use this purely as a regularly updating picture frame via the widget and nothing more.

Mediascape was always the better of the two and remains so but is still a bit clunky to use lacks many basic things such as a play queue, any way to create a playlist on the phone or select/delete multiple pictures. An accomplished music device, the X10 is not.

The update has also delivered the greatly improved and very attractive Android Gallery but SE have deemed this superfluous to their half baked effort and removed all links to it apart from via the picture frame widget. From the menus you wouldn’t even know it was there and indeed cannot open it but choosing a picture for a frame widget shows what you’re missing out on!

SE’s other main customisation is the keyboard. The previous version was initially disastrous before receiving a much needed update to make it a lot more user friendly though the main failing was the dubious auto-correction. It also had some very useful features such as left/right arrows for accurate text selection and a quick smilie shortcut key.

The new version bears no resemblance to it’s predecessor at all but that’s not to say it looks worse, it is actually very nice. The auto-correction is also greatly improved and pretty comparable to that of HTC. However, those nice shortcut keys I mentioned are gone, we have no arrow keys now and the smilies are accessed by a long press on the symbols key which, by the way has moved to the right and in it’s place is a totally unnecessary key to close the keyboard. Are you ready to see your keyboard disappear every time you go to insert a symbol until you get used to it. Another drawback of this is that the previous !? key has had to give way as well and now you need to change to symbols just to add either of these, then change back to text to carry on…this is not an improvement! Oh and you can’t manually teach it complex words anymore so the old trick of having the phone suggest your email address as a word doesn’t seem t work.

This may sound like the update is bad, it’s not but it doesn’t seem like it was worth waiting for. The phone is not ahead in any area, it’s just now not as far behind. The best thing is that we can finally put the endless wait to bed and enjoy the phone as it should have been when released. If this was how the X10 started it would have done so well but right now it’s too little too late.