The Sony Ericsson Xperia X8 is a mid-range 3G Android

smartphone A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, whic ...

developed by

Sony Ericsson Sony Mobile Communications Inc. ( ja, ソニーモバイルコミュニケーションズ株式会社) was a multinational telecommunications company founded on October 1, 2001, as a joint venture between Sony Group Corporation and Ericsson. ...

in the

Xperia Xperia () is the brand name of smartphones and tablets from Sony. The name Xperia is derived from the word "experience", and was first used in the Xperia X1 tagline of "I Xperia the best". Sony Mobile was previously known globally as Sony Er ...

series released in Q4 2010. It was sold in many countries worldwide, including the United States on AT&T Mobility and low-end pay-monthly contracts in the UK. It originally shipped running Android 1.6 but was upgraded in early 2011 to Android 2.1.

Hardware

The phone has a

capacitive touch screen A touchscreen or touch screen is the assembly of both an input ('touch panel') and output ('display') device. The touch panel is normally layered on the top of an electronic visual display of an information processing system. The display is ofte ...

LCD. It has a resolution of 320 by 480 pixels half-size video graphics array (

HVGA The graphics display resolution is the width and height dimension of an electronic visual display device, measured in pixels. This information is used for electronic devices such as a computer monitor. Certain combinations of width and height a ...

) with 24-bit depth. On the back is a 3.2-megapixel camera with fixed focus. Photos can be

geotagged Geotagging, or GeoTagging, is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as a geotagged photograph or video, websites, SMS messages, QR Codes or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial metadata. This data ...

. The camera can be accessed via the touchscreen menu, or via the dedicated camera button on the side of the phone. The Xperia X8 uses a 600 MHz Qualcomm

MSM7227 MSM7000 is a series of system-on-a-chip processors manufactured by Qualcomm for handheld devices, especially smartphones. These SOCs have multiple processing cores but unlike contemporary processor chips like AMD's Athlon/Phenom and Intel's Core s ...

processor, has a 3-axis accelerometer and built-in

GPS The Global Positioning System (GPS), originally Navstar GPS, is a satellite-based radionavigation system owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Space Force. It is one of the global navigation satellite sy ...

, a digital compass, an ambient light sensor and a lug for attaching a strap. Multi-touch support was also added to several aftermarket firmware versions (ROMs) as a sideloaded module (now newer kernel included the code to enable it) which enabled users to use basic multitouch gestures such as pinch to zoom (on Synaptics digitizer) and real dual-touch (on Cypress digitizer) thanks to XDA recognized developer doixanh, AnDyx & andrej456, something that

was adamant was impossible on the X8.

Software

Sony Ericsson has made its own custom overlay on the Android system using an optimized version of the UX (user experience) interface, which consists of design elements, themes and custom applications. The four corners of the screen have replaceable shortcuts for commonly used applications. The main application is Sony Ericsson Timescape, a social networking application that combines messages from Facebook, Twitter, SMS and email into a flowing column on the home screen. Photos may be attached to contacts or sent to a Facebook account. The phone contains expected smartphone applications, and Wisepilot Navigation Software,

Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets ( Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and rou ...

, YouTube, Sony's

PlayNow Arena PlayNow was Sony Ericsson's download service for media that included music, games, ringtones, wallpapers and themes. It was introduced in February 2004 as a way for owners of SE phones to listen to and directly purchase ringtones. It was rolled ou ...

and TrackID (to identify a song by recording a small part of it).

was widely criticized by X8 users for failing to provide Android firmware upgrades to 2.2 Froyo or 2.3 Gingerbread. They later stated that the phone's hardware was unable to run anything beyond 2.1 Eclair due to a lack of sufficient memory. They were later proved wrong by the Android modding community, who released their own versions of Android 2.2 and 2.3 in subsequent months, which ran stably on the X8.

CyanogenMod CyanogenMod ( ; CM) is a discontinued open-source operating system for mobile devices, based on the Android mobile platform. It was developed as free and open-source software based on the official releases of Android by Google, with added origi ...

released a 2.3 update for the X8 which required rooting. Since then, independent developers have made a fully working Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0), Jelly Bean (4.1 & 4.2), and KitKat (4.4) port using a custom

kernel Kernel may refer to: Computing * Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems * Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution * Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming * Kernel method, in machine learn ...

References

External links

* (archived) {{Sony phones Android (operating system) devices X8 Mobile phones introduced in 2010 Mobile phones with user-replaceable battery

Hardware

Software

See also

References

External links