Sony Ericsson X8 Xperia Sim Free Mobile Phone - Black

The Sony Ericsson X8

I've owned one of these for a while now, so here's a few thoughts that may be of use if you're considering this phone:

BUILD

Oddly, the front's ok but the back cover is cheap and nasty, and creaks if you press it. I dropped the phone one morning getting onto the train and the casing flew off and the battery fell out. Three pieces of phone all over the floor. Luckily it all snapped together again no problem. It's a budget phone, and you get what you pay for.

SCREEN

Not bad at all for the price. Fine for web browsing. Touchscreen not mega-responsive, but adequate.

ANDROID

Works ok on this model - it's a bit clunky now and then. HTC Desire it ain't. Some annoyances - touch the screen too long by accident and it thinks you want to add or remove widgets - a bit amateur in this sense.

MP3

Very good MP3 player - better than my iPod touch, and no daft sync type consolidate your market nonsense. Onboard speaker is fine. Get a 16 gig micro SD and you can put plenty of music on it.

CAMERA

Good in daylight - hopeless otherwise.

ALL IN ALL

I like the X8 - battery life is good so long as you remember to switch off wi fi and data traffic when not in use, and it does what it's supposed to do. The phone's OS works fine nearly all of the time (Angry Birds freezes sometimes). Shame about the bloatware though - why can't I delete Timescape, Crazy Penguin, TrackID and all the other useless trap that it's bundled with?

3.6 out of 5, rounded up to a 4.

ive owned this phone for about 2 months and i love it,
the touch screen is really responsive, nearly as good as ipods,
the phone overall is exelent for the price,
android id good, but u cant get any app to sd card apps, and the internal memory is not that big,
but for the price, it is amazing

I was wary about purchasing this phone after reading so many reviews claiming it to be sluggish with an unresponsive screen. However due to it being the only sub-£100 Android phone I could find with a capacitive touch screen I decided it was worth a try.

When I received it it was indeed a bit slow but it was also stuffed with preinstalled apps which hogged all the memory and seemed impossible to remove. But it is possible to remove them if you're willing to spend a bit of time on it. Here's the steps I took to make the phone a delight to use:

1) Root the phone. I used this tutorial [...] and it worked perfectly.

2) Install the app 'SuperUser' if it isn't on the phone from the marketplace: [...]

3) Install Titanium Backup from the marketplace ([...])

4) Perform a full backup of the phone to your SD card and then remove any of the preinstalled apps you do not want.

Following those steps should free up quite a bit of the limited internal memory. To keep any apps from running in the background and slowing down the phone you should also install 'Advanced Task Killer' from the marketplace. Using this you can kill any background processes you want. I also replaced the default home screen with ADW.Launcher - again, from the marketplace. This lets you customise the homescreen(s) in many ways and has made my phone much easier to use and navigate.

Battery life is pretty good. Today on the train I had 67% battery life, watched two episodes of Community and it went down to 62%. Installing RockPlayer is a must as the stock video player is incredibly basic. The CPU isn't fast enough to decode regular XViD avi videos but it does support x264 mp4 hardware decoding. So either download videos in that format to begin with or use HandBrake on your desktop computer to convert them. It has a preset for iphone video which matches the resolution of the X8 perfectly so it's a snap to use. Converting a 25min tv episode to mp4 takes about 5 minutes so it's not exactly a chore.

It only comes with Android 2.1 installed and it's not possible to upgrade it without flashing a custom rom. This is slightly more complex than rooting the phone so I'll leave the details out. The reason I mention this is that 2.2 added the native ability to create wireless hotspots so you can share your phones internet with your laptop, etc. Luckily there is a way around this. The marketplace hosts an app called Barnacle Wifi Tether which lets you do this on 2.1. You can also EasyTether which requires a USB cable to connect the phone to the laptop. With these two apps you can recreate the most useful feature of 2.2+ with ease.

If you're after a phone that can handle the latest 3D games and play HD video files then you will have to spend a lot more money. For the price the X8 is an excellent phone and just needs a bit of TLC to really achieve its potential. For the money you're getting a 3.2MP camera, a GPS navigation device, a portable video player, push email notifications, Android 2.1 (unless you want to use a custom ROM and go higher), access to the Android marketplace and all that entails and a responsive capacitive touch screen. If that's not a good deal then I don't know what is.

4 stars for the hardware but I'd give 5 stars to the value for money.