What's Exasperating About the Experia

The real world is nothing but the sum of paths leading nowhere. Raoul Ruiz

There are plenty of thing to like about the Sony-Ericcson X10 Exaspera.  I just can't think of any right now.  It is a plenty smart phone though; like now, because I am thinking about criticising it, the screen has frozen.  There are plenty of other things exasperating about it however.  I can think of most of those plenty, plenty easy. 

Texting.

The screen is touch sensitive, so they say.  When typing your finger must be a small as a child's.  They obviously road-tested this with skeletons.  My fleshy little digits overwhelm the screen and any random item in the vicinity of my desired function, such as a letter on the minuscule touch-screen keyboard (when the phone is vertical), or one of the tiny auto-suggested words nearby to the one I want, will go in.  All... the...  time...  It's exasperating. 

The auto-suggest words remember all your misspellings and it's bloody easy to misspell (see above comment).  If you accidentally touch in 'ftom' instead of 'from', when you try to type 'from' again, 'ftom' will be the first word suggested, 'atom' will be second and third suggested word  will be random for completely unfathomable reasons.  It's exasperating. 

If you notice a misspelled word or a wrongly inserted suggested word, you cannot easily touch the word in order to move the cursor back.  It has worked for me only once or twice.  I almost always have to use the back arrow button to reverse letter by letter to the place I want to correct. It's exasperating. 

Once I get there and try to correct the word, say from the 't' in in 'ftom', the auto-suggest will start with words commencing with the 'r' I just typed, the inserted letter not the 'f' which is the first letter in the word.  So I would get 'Rome' or 'random' or 'roam', instead of 'from', or indeed 'ftom' again. It's exasperating. 

If I then want to move forward again with the arrow button, it insert little circles instead of going forward.  I have no idea why this is. It's exasperating. 

In order to get the cursor back to the end of the message so I can keep typing, I have to try  the big finger thing to make the cursor move, which takes ages to succeed.  Usually I press repeatedly until it gets the message.  Even then the common response is for the Edit Text overlay to appear - the "Select Text" "Copy Text" "Erase Text" widget.  If I am still in the rhythm banging away I might accidentally delete all that I have typed.  It's exasperating. 

The "Send" button, a larger one and easy to hit, is just above the suggested word list. Guess what happens if I try to select the last word on the right. I send the message way before it is ready.  It's really fucking exasperating. 

The apostrophe and quotations marks are not on the front keyboard.  I have to select the second, numerical keyboard to type 'that's' as this word does not come up until on the suggest list until I have already typed the  apostrophe. If I type the 's' myself, even though the word is finished, it still suggest 'that's'.  I've already GOT that word in you X10!  It's exasperating. 

The '?' and the '!' share the same the same dedicated button.  You have to press the button twice to go from '?' to '!'.  If you are too slow, you will get  '?!'  which might be OK if you annotating a chess game or Twittering, but usually, not so much.  It's exasperating. 

Basic Functionality.

 The touch screen is nowhere near as sensitive as the iPhone's.  It takes a curved sweep of an arrow head to unlock the screen.  This flipped from a right thumb sweep to a left-thumb sweep once without any intervention on my part.  If you have the phone in the other hand it's a real pain to execute this maneuver.  Even then, half the time your sweep is not enough to carry the arrowhead all the way and it drops back into locked mode.  I sometimes have tried three, four times to open the screen up. 

Icons from some functions can be dragged from the application pull-up functions/programs page to one of three front (left/middle/right) screens.  However the spacing is quite wide and only 12 icons seem to fit on each page.  Moving them from screen to screen into position is a pain as losing firm slow screen contact will drop the icon back to where it was.

The pull-up program page has very small bar at the bottom of the screen. To "Drag" or "Flick" it up is OK, but not having RTFM I found it tricky at first and it kept going back down again. 

 You can turn WiFi on from  the right front screen, but selecting which node you want and entering the password requires you to pull up the program screen, scroll it down to 'Settings", and even more!  All up it takes seven flicks or pushes to get to the password screen.  On the iPhone it takes four.  There may be an Android app you can download to reduce this.  I tried two but neither of them bothered even to appear on my programs list.  Perhaps they were not compatible with the X10.

When you pill up the program page and open an application such as Settings in order to do something, when you have finished and press the Back hard key on the bottom of the phone, it doesn't take you back to the program page you just left, but to the Home screen. Sigh.  There is central Home Key if you wanted to go back there.

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