Nokia 5250 review: Back to basics

Introduction

They made a promise and kept it. What can we say – nice phone this Nokia 5250, but not an N8. Yeah we know, we need to be respectful and professional. But it’s easy to be a jerk to a 100-euro smartphone.
The Symbian-powered Nokia 5250 is bottom of the smartphone barrel. The low price suggests the feature set is going to be pretty spartan. Which doesn’t mean it’ll fight in the shade. It’s rather going to get into brawls with some pretty basic dumbphones.

Nokia 5250 official photos
The question here is who’s ready to sacrifice most of the features that make a smartphone, to save a few bucks. Alright some of Nokia’s touchscreen smartphones have been going around for peanuts but the 5250 is the lowest bidder by far. Some of the value-adding options don’t cost that much any more. But the Nokia 5250 encourages exactly the opposite kind of thinking. No budget is too tight and no feature is too important.

Key features

• Quad-band GSM, EDGE support
• 2.8" 16M-color 360 x 640 pixel resistive touchscreen
• S60 5th Edition (a.k.a. Symbian^1)
• ARM 11 434 MHz processor; 128MB of RAM
• 2 MP fixed-focus camera
• VGA (640 x 480 pixel) video recording @ 30fps
• Stereo Bluetooth v2.0
• microSD slot, microUSB port
• Accelerometer and proximity sensor
• Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
• FM radio with RDS
• Stylus tucked inside the phone's body
• Excellent loudspeaker performance
• Good audio quality
• Web browser has Flash video support

Main disadvantages

• No 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS receiver
• Poor screen quality
• Doesn’t charge off USB
• No preloaded Office document viewer
• No support for DivX/XviD videos out-of-the-box
• Gets sluggish as the memory card starts filling up
• No USB cable or memory card in the retail package

Being affordable is a big plus for a product and a short but focused spec sheet can be an advantage as well. After all, some people get confused by too many features while others just don’t need them. And they might be glad to have the 5250 around. So, the Nokia 5250 is the right phone for the right person. As indeed every other phone out there is designed to be.
There is no Wi-Fi, even 3G is missing from the specs sheet. And you won’t find an inbuilt GPS receiver either. But the bare minimum is covered. You still get quad-band GSM support and stereo Bluetooth and a decent 2.8 touchscreen.

Nokia 5250 live shots
The 2 megapixel snapper lacks autofocus, LED flash or geotagging but it can at least shoot VGA videos. There is a great music player, an FM radio with RDS and a reasonably stocked app market.
Now, let’s see what’s inside that tiny retail box. And then we’ll take a look at the phone’s build and finish.

Messaging has everything

The Nokia 5250 supports all common message types - SMS, MMS and email. They all share a common intuitive editor which by this point should be quite familiar to everyone.

The Nokia 5250 message editor
The email client is really nice, there to meet almost any emailing needs. The easy setup we found in the latest Nokia handsets is also available with the 5250. If you are using any public email service (it has to be among the over 1000 supported providers), all you have to do is enter your username and password to start enjoying email on the go. The phone downloads all the needed settings to get you going straight away.
Multiple email accounts and various security protocols are supported, so you can bet almost any mail service will run trouble-free on your Nokia 5250.

Checking email
Here might just be the right time to mention the input options on Nokia 5250. The handset offers a standard alphanumeric on-screen keypad, which automatically turns into a full QWERTY keyboard when you tilt the handset thanks to the accelerometer.

The on-screen text input options: numpad, QWERTY keyboard and handwriting recognition
Finally, the Nokia 5250 offers handwriting recognition, which did a rather decent job, recognizing almost all the letters we scribbled in the box. You can improve its performance by taking the handwriting training – where you actually show the handset how you write each different letter.

Sluggish image gallery

The gallery of Nokia 5250 is nicely touch optimized and there are sweep gestures enabled for flipping through photos displayed fullscreen.
You can sort images by date, title or size and you can also copy, move and delete them. Sending them via Bluetooth, email, MMS or sharing them online is also available straight from here.

Browsing images on the Nokia 5250
The default view is portrait but you can go to landscape automatically thanks to the built-in accelerometer. A slide show is also available but it doesn't have as many customizable settings as on some Nseries handsets.
You can also zoom in the photos to see more detail. Zoom is controlled via either the volume rocker or an on-screen touch slider. In all other cases, images are displayed full screen.

The transition from portrait to landscape is automatic
The gallery’s problem is speed. Loading a picture takes a couple of seconds even for small images. If you have a large number of photos it might take ages before the thumbnails are generated. Zooming and panning are not that much faster either. On the other hand, kinetic scrolling has been vastly improved. The real nuisance though is that photos in a folder require a double tap to display – one to select, another to open.

Music player stays the same

The Nokia 5250 music player is pretty functional but its design could use a little freshening up – it hasn't changed since we first saw it in the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. With user friendliness such a key aspect of full touch phones, it would be nice from Nokia to add some fun to the mix.
Your music library is automatically sorted by artist, album, genre and or composer and searching tracks by gradual typing is available. You can also create your own playlists in no time.

The music player does the job but could use a new skin
The process of adding tracks to the library is as simple as choosing the refresh option. You won't need to do that if you upload the music via the proprietary PC Suite application. With the huge number of supported formats you will hardly ever come across an audio file that the phone can’t handle.
Album art is also supported and if you don't like the default sound of the device you can enhance it by applying one of the five equalizer presets. And if they’re still not enough you can set new ones up in a matter of seconds.

Creating a new equalizer preset is easy
Quite naturally, the player can also be minimized to play in background. However, if you haven’t set the Music Player to appear on the standby screen, you will have no way to control it. Your only option would be to go back to the full music player app using the Task manager.

Basic video player

To begin with, a 2.8-inch screen is hardly the best thing to watch videos on. The lack of DivX and XviD codec support on the Nokia 5250 doesn’t help either.
Of course, you can use the Ovi PC Suite built-in application that automatically converts all kinds of video files to the format and resolution your phone supports. The automatic converter though seems to compress the videos too much, even at the highest quality setting, and they look over-pixelated but so far it's the easiest way of getting compatible video content to your handset.

The video player is somewhat of a disappointment
The video player itself only works in fullscreen landscape mode but, since anything else would have made the widescreen display useless, this is understandable. When in fullscreen, a tap on the screen shows the controls which are normally hidden.
Using the RealPlayer, you can not only watch the videos saved in the phone's memory or in the memory card but also to stream Internet video content.

FM radio with RDS

The FM radio on Nokia 5250 has a neat and simple interface and can automatically scan and save the available stations in your area. It also has RDS support and automatic scanning for an alternative frequency. This means that if you're on the go, the 5250 should take care of staying tuned to your selected radio station.

We have no grudges with the FM radio

Pretty good audio quality

The audio output of the Nokia 5250 is quite good, the handset passing our traditional test with flying colors. It won't amaze you with loudness, but, considering the clean output both with and without headphones,we are willing to let that go.
It doesn't matter if you are using headphones or if you have pluged the 5250 in an active amplifier - the frequency response is great with deviations only detectable in lab conditions. The same holds true for the noise level and the dynamic range as well as the total harmonic distortion. Intermodulation distortion and stereo crosstalk increase when headphones come into play, but they still remain perfectly tolerable. 

Poor 2 megapixel camera

Nokia 5250 has a 2 MP camera for a maximum image resolution of 1600x1200 pixels. There’s no auto focus or LED flash. Hardly the photography enthusiast’s dream, is it? Well, its performance isn’t anything to write home about either.
The camera UI can be quite confusing with all settings squeezed in a shared menu, which is no match for what some other manufacturers offer on their full-touch handsets.


The camera UI
On the positive side, the range of settings on the Nokia 5250 is extensive enough: from manual white balance and ISO to exposure compensation, sharpness and contrast. Various effects are also at hand, labeled color tones and there is also geo-tagging.
The viewfinder doesn't take the whole screen – a bar on the right is reserved for the touch controls. This way you get to see the whole frame rather than having a part of it cropped due to the aspect differences of the display and the sensor.
You have a settings button that launches a semi-transparent overlay of all available shooting options and an on-screen shutter key. With the lack of auto focus you might as well use that last one just as successfully as the regular shutter key.
No great expectations about the image quality turned out to be the right way to approach the Nokia 5250. The amount of resolved detail is pretty low and the contrast of the photos is a mixed bag. And with the noise also pretty high you get the idea that you better use the Nokia 5250 camera for taking contact pics only.

VGA videos

Video recording is definitely the better part of the Nokia 5250 imaging skills. The phone can shoot VGA at 30fps. Quite good, considering the 2 MP still shots. The relatively high compression results in lots of artifacts, but you still might consider the videos as ok, especially for an entry-level smartphone.


The camcorder UI
Videos are captured in MPEG-4 format and can have automatic or manual white balance. The other available settings are night mode, exposure and color effects.

Capable web browser hobbled by EDGE

The S60 web browser is decently usable, especially now that is also offers kinetic scrolling. There is still quite a lot of work to do before it is able to rival the best in class. The Android and iPhone browsers are miles ahead in terms of user-friendliness.
The Nokia 5250 browser has very good page rendering and boasts some nice features such as different font sizes (5 options), auto filling of web forms and a password manager.

The S60 web browser still needs some polishing
The built-in RSS reader will handle your feeds, while the download manager keeps things in order. There's also a popup blocker, but no open-in-a-new-window option.
A minimap is available for finding your way around elaborate pages and the Find on page feature is welcome. The visual history is a nice bonus that can help you easily find a page you've visited.
And now we get to Flash support. Yes, there is Flash support and it’s way better that it was back on the X6. The YouTube videos we’ve tested did well with almost no dropped frames, but the loading time was excruciating. Unfortunately the small screen and resolution won’t allow you to fit the whole YouTube screen in there. But we don’t think you’ll go watching Flash videos over an EDGE connection anyway. The mobile version of YouTube is an option.

Watching YouTube videos
Another upgrade over the X6 web browser is the better kinetic scrolling. It now works fine and manages to catch up with most of its competitors.
Double tapping on a block of text zooms it in on screen, but again, the zooming routine treats the whole page as an image and the browser doesn't refit the paragraph text to fill the screen properly (the so-called text-reflow). As a result, when you zoom in you still need to scroll sideways to read it.

Final words

The Nokia 5250 is a phone that expects to impress with nothing but its cheap price. It’s hard to think of it as a smartphone really – there’s so much missing from the package. It’s a Symbian set though and Symbian is the place to go if you’re looking for a budget smartphone.
The Nokia 5250 takes austerity seriously and thinks and acts small. Keeping a low profile did work marvelously for Nokia in their first attempts at touchscreen. The pioneer 5800 XpressMusic had its flaws but the competitive price made it a bestseller.
Later on, there were even cheaper phones to succeed it and there were compromises involved all along. It’s always been a matter of choice: Wi-Fi or GPS, 5530 or 5230. Now, the Nokia 5250 doesn’t even give you a choice. It’s the most basic of smartphones, stripped to the bone.
And Nokia clearly didn’t think they had removed enough hardware, so they got to work on the software too. You won’t get any Office application or widget-rich homescreen, not even a voice recorder. It’s an entry-level smartphone and they didn’t want to leave any doubt about that.
And the Nokia 5250 sure is cheap but you get to wonder if it’s cheap enough. It’s up against some of its own siblings and quite a number of dumbphones – some of which have obviously better specs.
Let’s get the Nokia phones out of the equation first, For nearly the same amount of cash (yes, the 5230 is clearly overpriced right now) you can get the Nokia 5230. Its specs are the same, except it has a bigger screen, integrated GPS and comes with Ovi Maps free turn-by-turn navigation. Makes little sense really – unless of course these are phones that will never compete on the same markets.

Nokia 5230
Further up the ladder – but not too far – we find another Symbian sibling. The Nokia 5530 has Wi-Fi connectivity, a 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash and a slightly bigger screen.

Nokia 5530 XpressMusic
An attractive candybar option – especially if you’re not keen on a touchscreen – is the Sony Ericsson Elm. It has an excellent 5 megapixel camera, 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS connectivity. It’s not a smartphone, we know, but for some it may not be a big deal.

Sony Ericsson Elm
If you are into the Android, the LG GT540 Optimus just got upgraded to Android v2.1 Eclair. It will give you a bigger screen, a better camera and a full-connectivity package including Wi-Fi and GPS. The Optimus costs about 30 euro more than the Nokia 5250 (overpriced as it is now).

LG GT540 Optimus
The Nokia 5250 is a true smartphone, but with its limited feature set, it would hardly make a difference. Its smartphone potential is obviously limited. It's Nokia's way of bringing touch phones to the mass market before a wave of S40 touch phones floods the lower market ranks.
And while it being a smartphone may not be so great, it certainly doesn't hurt. Besides, with the Nokia 5250 you can count on some great build quality, nice audio reproduction and a really loud loudspeaker. And as with most Nokia smartphones, it's going to enjoy proper software support as well. Just wait until the stick it a with a price tag that matches better its feature set.

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Sony Ericsson X8 review: XPERIA in the middle

Introduction

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X8 is likely to outsell the rest of the XPERIA droids. It’s neither the best phone in the line-up, nor it’s a phone to excite and inspire but it’s the common denominator. It is right in the middle. It’s an XPERIA for everyone – both size-wise and price-wise.
The X8 bridges the gap between two extremes. And it manages to find itself a niche in the process - a niche where it can breathe freely. It’s a place with healthy competition but no big egos around. The X8 is selling for as low as 175 euro and that makes it one of the least expensive Android smartphones on the market.

Sony Ericsson XPERIA X8 official photos
For a reasonable price, the phone offers the feature pack most of its rivals would give you. It has diverse connectivity options, a good music player, neat user interface, a built-in camera and access to social networks and the Android Market.
Average size and realistic price, the X8 fits snugly in the Android midrange and sets itself apart from its XPERIA siblings. That’s more than evident without digging too deep into the spec sheet.

Key features

• Quad-band GSM/EDGE, HSDPA 900/2100 / HSDPA 850/1900/2100
• 3.0" capacitive TFT touchscreen of HVGA resolution, 16M colors
• Scratch-resistant screen coating
• Android OS v1.6 Donut with custom Sony Ericsson UI, featuring Timescape
• Qualcomm MSM7227 600 MHz processor
• 128 MB onboard storage, microSD card slot (up to 16GB), 2GB card included
• 3 megapixel fixed-focus camera with geotagging, VGA video @ 30fps
• Wi-Fi connectivity
• Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP
• Built-in GPS receiver, digital compass
• microUSB port, charging enabled
• Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
• Excellent audio
• FM radio with RDS
• Accelerometer for UI auto-rotate
• Social networking integration

Main disadvantages

• Limited storage for installing third-party apps
• Outdated Android OS version
• No multi-touch support
• Camera lacks autofocus
• No DivX video support out of the box
• microSD slot under the battery cover
• No secondary video-call camera

Imaging is certainly middling: no autofocus and measly 3 megapixels. The screen on the other hand has grown to a healthy 3 inches and standard HVGA resolution.
What is still missing though is a more recent Android OS version. Like the rest of the Android-based XPERIAs, the X8 is running Android v1.6 (Donut). An update to Android 2.1 Eclair is due but there is still no word of Froyo ever coming the XPERIA way.

Sony Ericsson XPERIA X8 live shots
This is obviously a concern, but the Sony Ericsson X8 is still worth a look as a possible purchase. After all, it offers a well balanced feature set and it’s fairly priced. But that’s something to talk about at the end of our review.
Not before we’ve looked inside the box and had design and handling duly covered. That’s what we’re up to after the break.

Gallery with one-finger zoom

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X8 gallery automatically locates the images, no matter where they are stored. There is none of the cool new look of Android 2.1 Eclair – you just get a plain grid with your images sorted by date.
The gallery supports finger scrolling or panning so you can skip images without having to return to the default view. Just sweep to the left or right when looking at a photo fullscreen, and the previous/next image will appear.

The image gallery is decent but hardly the best we’ve seen
Pinch-zooming isn’t available but Sony Ericsson have come up with their own version of one-finger zoom that actually works great. You just hold your finger down and than sweep upwards for zooming in or downwards for zooming out. There’s also the double-tap zoom if that’s how you roll.

The one-finger zooming is quick and responsive
Unfortunately, there is no Bluetooth file transfer in the gallery or any other fancy functionality that more demanding users might expect. The X8 is a simple tool for previewing your images and it won’t do much more than that.

Bluetooth file transfers from the gallery are not an option

A basic video player on board

The video player is simple in looks and functionality. You get a list of all videos available on the phone and play/pause, skip controls, as well as a draggable progress bar.

The video player is as simple as it gets
MP4 files are as good as it gets. The XPERIA midi cannot play DivX/XviD videos but you could look for a more versatile video player over at the Android Market.

The music player does the job

The music player on the XPERIA X8 didn’t get much in terms of new features. It manages your audio files decently but there is very little extra functionality beyond that.

The music player is decent looking and snappy
The best bit is the Infinite key that allows you to quickly look up a song or album on YouTube or Sony Ericsson’s own Play Now arena.

Pressing the Infinite button let’s you look up tracks on YouTube and Play Now arena
There isn’t even gradual typing for searching a specific song with the virtual QWERTY, so you will have to use the kinetic scrolling or opt for artist sorting. At least there are three smart playlists that automatically gather your Newly added, Most played and Never played tracks.
There are still a lot of shortcomings of the music player that need addressing, though. For example there are still no equalizer presets, nor any alternative skins.

Decently clean and pleasingly loud audio output

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X8 did decently in our traditional audio quality test. The best part of its performance is probably the high volume, but the spot-on frequency response and the low distortion levels are not to be neglected either.
The stereo crosstalk, dynamic range and noise level readings are hardly impressive, but they aren't too bad either.
Interestingly enough, when headphones come into play the stereo crosstalk doesn't increase as much as with some other handsets and is in fact better than we are used to seeing. The intermodulation distortion increases a bit but is still hardly something to worry about, while the rest of the readings remain decent, if unspectacular.

An uninspiring 3 megapixel fixed-focus snapper

On the hardware side of things, the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X8 has a 3 megapixel camera module for a maximum image resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels. Sadly, there is neither autofocus nor flash.
The camera interface is as simple as it gets with three buttons in total. There is a camera/camcorder switch, a gallery button and scene mode. The four available scene presets include twilight, sports, beach/snow and, of course auto.

The camera interface
You can enable geotagging, which is the most advanced feature available. You’ll have to go all the way to Settings / Sony Ericsson / Camera to find that option though, it’s not available in the camera app itself.
This is certainly one of the most basic camera interfaces on the market but we guess Sony Ericsson thought users wouldn’t need much more and would prefer simplicity to functionality. In the end, it all comes down to the image quality, so let’s see.
The image quality turned out to be disappointing. The aggressive noise reduction smudges fine detail and the white balance could’ve been better too.
Here are some real-world samples from the XPERIA X8 camera:

Sony Ericsson XPERIA X8 camera samples

Synthetic resolution

We also snapped our resolution chart with the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X8. You can check out what that test is all about You can check out what that test is all about here.

Sony Ericsson XPERIA X8 resolution chart photo * 100% crops

VGA video recording

Video recording on the X8 goes as high as VGA resolution which, needless to say, is far from impressive. At least the framerate is a good 30 fps and consistent enough.
The interface of the camcorder is similar to the one on the still camera, except that there are even fewer settings. You can set the video quality, turn the video light on and off and that's that.

The camcorder mode
Videos are rendered in 3gp format suggesting lower bitrate, which in turn leads to some compression artifacts. Video also suffers from the lack of contrast so videos aren't too nice to watch on a computer screen.
Here is VGA@30fps video sample shot at VGA@30fps.

Connectivity is well covered

Despite its size, you get all the connectivity options on the XPERIA X8. For starters, you get quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE for worldwide roaming and two versions with either dual-band (900/2100 MHz) or tri-band (850/1900/2100 MHz) 3G with HSPA.
As for local connectivity, the X8 offers USB v2.0, Bluetooth v2.1 with A2DP support (no file transfer though) and Wi-Fi. The USB interface is standard microUSB and it can charge the phone over a USB connection to a computer.
The microSD card is accessible in mass storage mode or you can plug it into a card reader, which is the fastest way to do bulk data transfers.

A nice but Flash-less web browser

The Android browser on the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X8 is a very good one – the major disadvantage is the lack of Flash support. This could change eventually, but the X8 will have to be updated to Android 2.2 Froyo.
The user interface is rather minimalist – all you get on the screen are the zoom controls. The address bar is hidden by default to save some space as the low resolution doesn’t allow much content to fit on the screen anyway.

The X8 web browser
Unfortunately, the Android browser on the X8 supports only a single zoom method – the dedicated onscreen buttons. There is no double tap or one-finger zooming like in the Gallery.
On the positive side, the browser supports text reflow – as soon as you zoom, columns of text adjust to fit the screen width. And there’s also the nice magnifying glass browsing mode, which let’s you browse the page quickly until you reach the part that you want to focus and then zoom in on to read it.

The magnifying glass mode can help you quickly search larges sites for specific bits of info
The minimalist UI is still quite powerful – hit the menu key and four keys pop up. You can open/switch tabs, refresh the page, go forward, open bookmarks.

The available options • Multiple tabs can be opened
Flash support is the other letdown of the X8 browser. There is of course a YouTube application onboard but Flash content doesn't start nor end with YouTube.

GPS navigation

No surprise, the X8 comes with Google Maps out of the box. Multi-touch doesn't work so you’re stuck with the traditional zoom keys or double tapping.

Naturally Google Maps is here too
A tap-and-hold on the screen activates a popup menu which ,among other things, can launch Street view. As usual, you can enjoy the 3D view of the area, which is controlled by sweep gestures with impressive fluidity. They can also make use of the built-in compass for an even better experience – just hold the phone in your hand and turn around and Street view will follow you.

Street view also works with the built-in compass
If you’re in one of the supported countries you could try Google Maps Navigation – it should work on Android 1.6 Donut, even if some of the features from the Eclair version aren’t available (e.g. voice commands). Google Maps Navigation is the voice-prompt enabled version of Google Maps.
The other preinstalled map application is Wisepilot, which is found on other platforms. The thing about Wisepilot is that it requires a license for voice guided navigation and it downloads data over the Internet. That makes it unsuitable (or at least really expensive) for using abroad.

WisePilot comes preinstalled and does voice-guided navigation
There are already several ways around that of course. The Android Market offers a dozen of applications (both free and paid) so it’s up to you to pick one that best suits you. The problem is that the screen and the phone itself seem too small to use for navigation but we guess everyone should judge that for themselves.

Final words

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X8 has just made it to the market but parts of it still seem stuck in last year. At the same time though it is more than decently equipped for its 170 euro price tag. It has its downsides and those are easy to notice but there are a bunch of plusses too, especially if you are new to Android.
The Timescape app is one of the good things about the XPERIA X8. Another one is the Four corner UI which is user-friendly and makes good use of the screen estate. There is a great set of connectivity options too and, last but not least, the X8 screen is standard-issue 320 x 480 pixels. If you’ve been paying attention you’d know we’re not too fond of QVGA droids. The XPERIA X10 minis have a legitimate excuse.
And while we’re at it: the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 mini and X10 mini pro have a 2.55” QVGA display each. That’s small and low-res but we’re talking some of the smallest smartphones ever. The important point is whether and how the X8 benefits from the added size and pixel density.
The X8 gives the user interface a lot more room to work with and handling is more user-friendly. Standard resolution lets the phone make better use of the Android market. On the bigger screen web browsing is now a different story.
On the other hand, there’s still no multi-touch and banding is perhaps more annoying than on the minis. In the end though, the X8 makes more sense for routine everyday tasks. The X10 minis are in a different league. They’re so small they’re special. And obviously still more expensive – both cost over 200 euro each.

Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 mini • Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 mini pro
Another option is the LG GT540 Optimus (priced at less than 150 euro) or maybe its recently announced successor, the upcoming Optimus One P500. The Optimus comes with a resistive touchscreen and the same limited storage for apps but its camera has autofocus and its Android 2.1 update has already been released. But while the Optimus One seems like a more viable alternative, it’s expected to cost around 235 euro.

LG GT540 Optimus • LG Optimus One P500
Last but not least, there’s the HTC Wildfire. With a multi-touch-enabled 3.2” screen, a 5MP autofocus snapper, HTC Sense and premium finish, it is all but ready to blow the X8 apart. However, the QVGA touchscreen ruins it all – it’s just too low to let the Wildfire deliver a proper Android user experience. The HTC Wildfire costs around 30 euro more than the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X8 but we won’t fuss it.

HTC Wildfire
If we have to name one phone that we’ll choose over the X8 any day, no questions asked, it would be the HTC Aria (or its just announced twin, the HTC Gratia). But – and it’s a big one – the price tag is a big part of the equation. The X8 is hard to beat really if budget is your first concern.
Let’s face it: the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X8 misses the wow factor. It has something else instead – a fair price and a well balanced set of features. Can’t be so bad now, can it? Unfortunately, it can. And while the competition isn’t too hard at least for a while, Sony Ericsson are damaging their own prospects by taking too long with the Android upgrades.

 

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