Be it after a long delay, I finally did catch up with Android by getting myself a Sony Ericsson X8 phone. Why X8, some may ask? I want to start by saying that I've a bias towards Sony devices. I like their sound quality more than anything else. I've used an SE phone before, a T610 and except for the battery, it was simply great. On Android, I do know that SE has been crawling releasing 2.1 Eclair on new launches, when the competition has moved beyond 2.2 Froyo onto 2.3 Gingerbread. X8 specifically has a low memory with its standard release giving only 128MB, while even LG's Optimus gives 512MB in a similar pricing! Then again, as they say... its a Sony! :) Worse yet, unless one gets a newer manufacture, 2.1 is available only as an upgrade to 1.6 Donut.
That said, I still chose SE X8 because it is a good phone and although SE has officially announced that there shall not be further upgrades to X8, XDA forum currently has both Froyo and Gingerbread releases for X8! There are many other flavours also, including one in between, called FroyoBread. The last one is supposed to be a well-tested release with Froyo's stability and Gingerbread's features. In this blog, I wish to mention some of the features of the standard SE release with the requirements to hack the phone for non-standard upgrades. Mind you, this voids the warranty [unless you can get the phone back to factory release before claiming warranty ;) ] I've bought an additional warranty of another 12 months from the seller beyond the standard 1 year by SE.
Initially, I liked the SE X8, with a decent 3" screen. Both GSM Edge as well as WiFi worked just fine. The still as well as video camera is great. One issue with 2.1 is that its applications soon fill up the memory and since Android has its own memory management, with hardly any applications having an "exit", Advanced Task Killer is necessitated as a first install from Android's market. Yet another hurdle with enjoying more apps on 2.1 is that it doesn't allow moving apps to SD card. So my buying a 16GB card didn't turn out much useful yet. Having seen my 2.3 GingerBread on my brother's HTC Wildfire S, I couldn't wait to root the phone. Further, I found out that Quadrant Advanced clocks 440 as a benchmark with SE Eclair. This is expected to turn out to be rock-bottom with other releases, which I'll talk of in upcoming posts.
That said, I still chose SE X8 because it is a good phone and although SE has officially announced that there shall not be further upgrades to X8, XDA forum currently has both Froyo and Gingerbread releases for X8! There are many other flavours also, including one in between, called FroyoBread. The last one is supposed to be a well-tested release with Froyo's stability and Gingerbread's features. In this blog, I wish to mention some of the features of the standard SE release with the requirements to hack the phone for non-standard upgrades. Mind you, this voids the warranty [unless you can get the phone back to factory release before claiming warranty ;) ] I've bought an additional warranty of another 12 months from the seller beyond the standard 1 year by SE.
Initially, I liked the SE X8, with a decent 3" screen. Both GSM Edge as well as WiFi worked just fine. The still as well as video camera is great. One issue with 2.1 is that its applications soon fill up the memory and since Android has its own memory management, with hardly any applications having an "exit", Advanced Task Killer is necessitated as a first install from Android's market. Yet another hurdle with enjoying more apps on 2.1 is that it doesn't allow moving apps to SD card. So my buying a 16GB card didn't turn out much useful yet. Having seen my 2.3 GingerBread on my brother's HTC Wildfire S, I couldn't wait to root the phone. Further, I found out that Quadrant Advanced clocks 440 as a benchmark with SE Eclair. This is expected to turn out to be rock-bottom with other releases, which I'll talk of in upcoming posts.
