The next Holy Grail for smartphone lovers?

I’m probably Sony Ericsson’s worst nightmare. I never upgrade my cell phone, and I still hang on to my old W290 Walkman mobile because it takes good photos and plays most of my music files. I never go searching for the Holy Grail in smartphone technology, which the latest Sony Ericsson entry, the Xperia X10, promises — and for the most part, delivers.

Sony Ericsson will launch the X10 in the Philippines in late March, a few beats ahead of the much-ballyhooed iPad in April. What makes it a viable contender? Well, it’s a phone (duh!) which iPad isn’t, and it does a lot of things that Apple products do pretty well. Plus the price — in the low P30K range — is attractive.

The look of the X10 overlay should be familiar by now to smartphone users — lots of touch-screen icon widgets — though there are new surprises courtesy of Sony Ericsson’s Mediascape and Timescape features (more on that later).

The X10 also offers a larger viewing experience — a four-inch (diagonal) viewing screen, bigger than iPhone’s 3.5-inch — thanks in part to sliver-thin horizontal keys at the base of the phone (not round buttons). Doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a bragging point for gadget geeks, for whom size does matter. And its relative bulk seems to point in the size direction of the iPad.

The camera carries a hefty 8.1 megapixels (much better than iPhone 3G’s three MPs) and has useful features like Smile Detection, touch focus and face recognition, which instantly helps you set up a contact with a face attached to it (as we tested during a recent launch of the phone at Resorts World in Singapore). Even upgrade-resistant users such as myself have little trouble buttoning through the menus to get my picture edited and onto a contact list. That’s because the layout is familiar and intuitive, a push toward maximum usability. And another plus: X10 has a 3.5mm headphone jack, which its earlier smartphone, Satio, didn’t.

Because of the slightly wider face, the pull-up QWERTY touchscreen is a little easier for non-petite fingers to navigate but, wisely, the keypad also auto-orientates if you tilt the device sideways.

Mostly, though, it’s under the hood where the Xperia action takes place. This is Sony Ericsson’s first, long-awaited smartphone to run on Google’s Android software, which gives Xperia models a much smoother operating experience than, oh, say, Windows 6.5.

How smooth? Well, it leaps around from function to function quickly. You don’t have to close menus to maneuver around. (The demo we tested, though, only had Android 1.6 Donut installed, but this is easily upgradable — for free — to Android 2.1.) The screen resolution is DVD-quality (WVGA 480 x 854 pixels), though we didn’t test it with a full range of videos.

Sony Ericsson’s had great success by tying into consumer demand with its specialized Walkman and Cyber-shot phones over the past few years; now it wants all the marbles, just as the other mobile brands do. It wants an all-in-one “experience” phone. One roadmap to the Holy Grail is its Timescape and Mediascape features, which allow X10 users to coordinate all relevant information about themselves, or about a given media search. In practical terms, you don’t have to jump out of one menu and into another: Timescape and Mediascape, powered by Android, does it for you. Timescape allows you to check out all your texts, emails, photos, Facebook and Twitter messages in one chronological touch-screen lineup. Mediascape does the same for media content, lining up, say, your Black-Eyed Peas videos, photos and tracks, all accessible within a downward scroll or a sideways finger swipe.

The X10’s “infinite” button goes a step further: it coordinates all the online content it can find along with your phone content, whether on Google, YouTube or Sony Ericsson’s PlayNow feature, and places it all onscreen for you. This is true whether you’re looking at contacts, photos, or listening to your MP3s: with a press of the button, the infinite feature gets busy seeking online content that’s a relevant match. As one Swedish technician at the Singapore launch put it: “It starts thinking for you.”

It’s Android’s open operating system that will allow Sony Ericsson to expand the user linkups beyond YouTube or Twitter or any preset, proprietary notions and into the “next big thing.” Open-endedness, as we know, has not been a strong point among certain other mobile manufacturers.

Hirokazu Ishizuka, corporate VP and head of Asia Pacific Region, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, made the point that the X10 opens up a new chapter for the phone maker: “Definitely the Android phone will be a very important portfolio. But we will also keep and carry over the current Walkman phones and launch new Walkman phones as well. The Satio is really still selling well. So the Android portfolio will just strengthen the total Sony Ericsson portfolio.”

Peter Ang, VP for Marketing Asia Pacific Region, explained how the X10 expands on Satio: “The X10 market is more a combination of entertainment and communication into one. One of our key differentiators is the Timescape, bringing all your communications into one place. So not just your common SMS and e-mail, but your Facebook and Twitter will all be available in one place.”

Sounds good. But will Android provide everything for everybody? With Android, Ang said, “We embrace openness, we allow developers to develop applications to enhance the features.” Though the X10 ships with a stripped-down 1.6 version, Sony Ericsson promises easy from-the-air upgrades.

“We are really focused on customer experience,” Mr. Ishizuka adds. “This will be a totally different user experience, and you will know it if you start to use it. You immediately upload everything, without going back to the PC. We just try to give a new way, a new entertainment solution, to our users.”

To push home the point of X10’s strong social network advantages, “digital endorsers” the Wonder Girls trotted out onstage after Ishizuka’s opening remarks. Clutching their phones (later, they would clutch themselves while singing Nobody, Nobody at a media appreciation dinner), they affirmed the strengths of the X10: “It’s truly revolutionary for us, because we are so addicted to social networking services, and we’re really looking forward to what’s next.”

Along with the signature X10, Sony Ericsson also demoed its smaller versions — the Xperia 10 Mini (with four designated corner touch buttons for a smaller one-hand experience) and Xperia 10 Mini Pro (with slide-out QWERTY keypad) — which will come out soon after, but the device that caught a sizeable amount of attention was shown in the adjacent room, where Sony Ericsson’s “Greenheart” line featured noise-cancellation technology in its Elm and Hazel phones: we all were instantly sold on a phone that cancels out mall noise or club chatter — and it actually worked! Alas, that’s the only exclusive feature on the Elm and Hazel, so until technology packs noise-cancellation technology into an X10… well, the search for the Holy Grail continues.