By wolfstar
30th September 2008.
16:17
Monthly Archives: September 2008
Today is the official launch date for the Xperia X1 and I just wanted to confirm to everyone that it has launched as planned. Units have left the factory and are on their way to the shops in the UK and Nordic markets where they should be available in the next week or so.
The new X1 product site is also live and has some consumer videos demonstrating some of the X1’s strengths, including a look at the panels and how you can personalise your X1. Other videos cover mobile internet, the wide VGA touch screen, the arc slider qwerty keyboard, camera and video recorder, MP3 player, Google Maps and assisted GPS. There’s even a video about how you can use the X1 to make and receive calls!
Mobile phones are the most personalized piece of consumer electronic gadget in the world. Ringtones, wallpapers etc have always been a way for user to make the device his own. But the mobile user experience has always lagged to provide that flexibility to the end user. The Ux has always been a set of philosophies which the phone manufacturers believed, were ideal for their end users with no flexibity to adopt it to their lifestyle or usage.
This is what we are trying to change with XPERIA panels. The person of the year according to Time magazine is ‘YOU’ , the end user. When we started designing the user experience for X1, our first objective was to provide the control back to User. Make a Ux that adopts or help end user adapt to different usage and experience important to him. The information an user can consume in a high end device like X1 (both from the web and phone) is enormous and the panel Ux enables user to consume that information in a easy,structured and most important in a way appropriate to his lifestyle.
The important piece of real estate in the phone is the DESKTOP. The information on this real estate has been determined/forced upon to the user by handset OEMs for years. Some OEMs have put shortcut to apps (this is a trend these days) ,some have put business info , some have put SEARCH . But as an end user the relevant information on desktop changes based on the time,usage and type of consumption.At work I need business info (calendar, emails), Shortcuts to apps when I need to access phone functions, SEARCH when I want to access web, Sports info with results of the days if I am a sports geek, monitor the social network activity if I am a SOCIAL BEING, monitor my EBAY bid if I am an active eBay user, updated concert event on my desktop if I am a concert freak, new videos updates from Youtube or access to todays news on your desktop when I wake up in the morning. As you can see the information relevant to different users at different instances are so varied and the Panel Ux was designed to power the user to pick and choose these experiences(Panels) on his desktop.Panels let user personalize the phone to an extent that has never been done before. The user can, with the press of XPanel key easily choose the relevant panels from his favourite 9 panels.From the hundreds of panels that user can install on his phone, he/she can choose 9 as his/her favorites.
This is the real 2.0 User experience for mobile phones in an era of convergence, of not only technologies but also phone usage.
-Ramanath@ Mountain view park.
This blog is coming up to being two weeks old and we’ve received a fair few questions in the comments sections. Yesterday I went through the questions with Ramanath and we sorted out answers to those which are most commonly asked. So here goes:
• Launch dates / networks etc… It’s really not up to us to say which networks will be carrying the phone and when. They all have their own business plans and their own plans for the launch etc…. so we’re not going to get involved in speculation as to who will carry it and when. The launch date of the 30th is the day we ship the phones to the networks and there will, most likely be some lead time before it appears. (though I’d expect to see it on some shelves in early October.)
• Is there an accelerometer? No.
• Will there be 30 fps video recording? Yes ,as promised.
• Will there be one or two versions of the phone? There will be two versions, one for the US and one for everyone else.
• Is there any difference between the black and silver versions of the phone? Yes, one is black, the other is silver. Other than that, no they are the same phone.
• How big is the battery and how long does it last? The battery is a 1500mAh unit (about 10% bigger than, for example, the touch pro). How long it lasts depends very much on how much you use the phone. Even in the worst case scenario, with all the features turned on (GPS, internet, applications etc…) and heavy usage, it will last all day and need to be charged over night.
• Questions re: the speed etc… The device has a graphics accelerator, a 528 Mhz processor and 384 megs of ram (so it should be as fast as anything else that is out there.)
That’s it for the moment, keep the questions coming and we’ll keep trying to answer them. We should also take this opportunity to thank all of you who have been involved so far. Since we launched on the 15th we’ve had more than 9,000 unique visitors and 28,000 page views (which is more than we hoped for). The opportunity to engage in a conversation with all of you is hugely important to us and we genuinely appreciate your involvement in the site.
Thanks again,
Sam Oakley and Ramanath Bhat
Many people have asked me about the battery consumption on the XPERIA X1. Fair question I think, what is a user experience without power?
Sony Ericsson noted this from the beginning in the X1 development, and therefore we had a special project to work on a new battery. Project name: Hercules (and I think it’s evident where the name comes from).
The battery in the X1 is 1500mAh, which is a large battery.
This topic is very tricky, since he phone in itself has many great features, but they consume a lot of power (a-GPS, WiFi, a large screen etc etc). Nevertheless, this is a really important area and I would therefore like to raise it. I use the phone daily – a lot! – and I usually charge it over night.
Magnus
Hello, It’s been a couple hectic days here in London. We started off with the Johnny-x webcast which was seen live by almost 5000 journalists over the world! That was amazing in itself! After that, the phone started ringing…
Anyway, the week proceeded well and we have been active in our exhibition room at TENT London where we show the X1 in a very different way compared to what we are used to – being at a design fair and all.
Merran made a note of us being “outside of our comfort zone”, which was maybe correct since we usually talk to “techier” press and consumers, but why should it be so difficult, really? I think the X1 looks great in it’s metallic case! I use a silver one.
Magnus
