Going mobile: Sony, in the guise of its partnership with Swedish maker Ericsson, is combining the much-touted Android phone platform from Google with its traditional feature-rich offerings in the form of the Xperia X10. Sporting a larger than normal 4-inch, TFT-capacitive touch screen, the candybar-style phone also runs on a hefty 1-gigahertz Snapdragon processor. The headline features are on the software side, though, in the form of its UX interface and the Timescape and Mediascape applications. In essence, UX is a Sony-Ericsson customization of the 1.6 version of Android. Timescape organizes all of the phone's communications, such as Facebook, Twitter, e-mail and text messages into a single assembly organized in chronological order that can be searched by source or person. Mediascape serves a similar purpose, collecting all the media content on the phone, such as music, or available online via networking services. The ambitious aspiration is to spare users the onerous task of sorting through multiple files and locations looking for content and so making the user experience easier and more enriching.

To aid its multimedia aspirations the X10 comes with an 8.1-megapixel camera, again on the heftier end of phone features, with face-recognition, image stabilization and video ability. Whether making it simple to have the faces of photo subjects in focus is a must-have feature or not may come down to personal preference. In anticipation of users making frequent use of the camera, and other memory hogs, the X10 comes with 1 gigabyte of onboard memory and microSD card, augmented by an 8-gigabyte card in the package. The inclusion of a 3.5 mm headphone jack is a thoughtful feature that too many phone makers manage to forget. As a straight phone it will include both W-CDMA and GSM frequencies. The sleek if squarish X10 measures 119 × 63 × 13 mm and tips the scales at 135 grams. It will come in color choices of black or white.

Judging the value of the X10 is made difficult since it doesn't come out until the first quarter of next year with no word yet on pricing, or which phone companies will carry it. On the basis of ambition alone it is an exceptional creation and it is certain to carry an appropriate price tag. How well it lives up to these aspirations yet to be seen. www.sonyericsson.com/cws/products/mobilephones/specifications/xperiax10