Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro review

An Android 2.1 update will, Sony Ericsson tells us, be coming to both the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini and Mini Pro in Q3 of this year.

The Sony Ericsson UI, however, masks the vanilla Android interface nicely.

The usual Android slide-down information bar is present, and you can also slide from the bottom up to access the menu.

The menu is organised across four different screens, although the sensitivity of the display means it's too easy to open up one of the sub menus or applications when swiping.

In the four corners, there are shortcuts to messaging, music, the phone function and the phonebook. It's an efficient way of saving space in the main body of the screen, although shortcuts to email and the browser wouldn't go amiss.

There are only four home screens, which significantly limits the number of widgets you can apply to the Xperia X10 Mini Pro. We'd rather it had seven, especially as you can only add one to each screen because the display is so tiny.

Apps that come preinstalled on the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro are pretty limited, but there is access to Android Market where you can bump it up a little.

Handy apps include Dataviz's Roadsync for synching your calendars, email, contacts and other information. It also allows you to remotely wipe your device just like with Android 2.2. Roadsync almost makes up for the lack of native Exchange support, but not quite.

Also bundled with the X10 Mini Pro comes a Wisepilot SatNav trial version, which isn't the most useful app on a device with such a small screen. We really don't recommend using the X10 Mini Pro as a standalone SatNav device when driving.

Amongst the Sony Ericsson Time and Mediascape social networking and multimedia apps, there's also a handy backup and restore app that allows you to backup to a cloud service.