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My plans for posting a review of the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 Mini Pro early this week have been derailed by its even littler brother, the XPERIA X10 Mini arriving at my doorstep on Monday. After playing with it for a few days, I’ve got some thoughts, especially in comparison to the X10 Mini Pro.
The obvious missing piece in the X10 Mini is the physical keyboard. As a purebred BlackBerry user, the lack of real keys has been a real nuisance for me. A multitap virtual keyboard is precise but slow, while the predictive one is fast, but occasionally way off. Despite that, the text handling is still excellent, in that switching to different kinds of virtual keyboards is really easy, and choosing prediction options is convenient and fluid.
Moving the cursor around is mostly a great experience, in that a long press will pop up a preview of the whole row and the cursor’s position right above your finger. The small caveat there is that if you long press in one spot when first doing this, you can accidentally bring up the native “Edit text” popup.
Typing aside, the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini’s screen is just a smidgen wider than the Mini Pro, which meant more room for browsing and multimedia. The 5 megapixel camera is fine for pictures that you’re just tossing up on Facebook, but I’m still unconvinced that they could be used for print; every time I view the pictures on a monitor at full size, there’s barely any detail at all, but if it’s scaled down for the web, the quality’s more than ample.
Like the Mini Pro, I haven’t found the small size or screen impede functions at all, aside from there being a few apps that aren’t compatible, but battery life is still a concern. As you can see in the video, the battery isn’t removable, which may be a downer for those interested in carrying a spare. Seeing as how neither handset can get through a full day of moderate to heavy use, that would be a nice option to have.
Full review of both the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini and Mini Pro coming next week, but here are some stills and a video in the meantime.
