Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 phone

I was asked recently how I rate Google’s Android phone…

I was asked recently how I rate Google’s Android phone, the Nexus One, against the iPhone. Well, excellent as the Nexus was/is, it is still like comparing something produced by a talented B-stream student with the work of the really smart A-streamers, namely our old fruit-crumble friends, Apple and BlackBerry.

Sorry to sound like a broken record (OK, a corrupted MP3 file, to update that cliché) but – and bear in mind the iPhone 4G may well be out by the time you read this – that’s just the way it is in the tough mobile-phone world.

And so to Sony Ericsson’s Xperia X10. It has a beautiful four-inch touchscreen, an 8.1-megapixel camera, and it runs Android, so there are plenty of interesting apps (and they’re not censored by Apple like the 100,000-plus available from the iTunes store). It also has a thing called Timescape, which makes all your Tweets, social-networking contacts, status reports and the like float attractively across your pretty blue screen, like tropical fish in a tank.

All quite nice, then, and highly commendable for a B-stream class project, but still very much one for the kids. And if they have any sense, they’ll be wanting an iPhone 4G anyway. Shame, but life’s like that.

Fact Box:

£460, SIM-free, in black or white, at www.expansys.com; 0161-868 0868 and see www.sonyericsson.com.