Database Users

XPERIA X1 review

A detailed review by smape.com for the still unreleased SE's Xperia X1...
Read the whole thing here
Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 is a very specific, yet an efficient PDA. It would make a great choice for those looking for a WM PDA sporting just as much computing power and versatility as fashionable looks, equipped with a QWERTY keyboard (yet not the handiest around). All in all, the product appears to be a balanced solution, on of the best in its class. Final conclusions will be drawn upon testing a next-to-final sample later in autumn. The currently available sample makes a great Christmas gift provided that SE fixes the spotted weaknesses on time, without pushing the release date into the next year.
+ Stylish design, original form factor
+ High quality of materials and assembly
+ Large high-definition screen
+ Long battery life
+ 3.5 mm audio jack
+ XPERIA panels firmware launcher
+ Powerful CPU, 256 Mb of RAM
+ Wi-Fi and GPS, as well as an FM tuner
- High price
- Challengeable keyboard ergonomics
- Non-canon screen resolution
- No TV-out
- No hardware 3D acceleration

And again from smape, a head to head between Xperia X1 and Touch Pro...
http://smape.com/en/reviews//HTC_Touch_Pro-Sony_Ericsson_XPERIA_X1-prev.html
though, most of the things mentioned in this article are somewhat covered in the review...

marios96 said:
- No hardware 3D acceleration
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Oh C'mon, I've used this phone for a while now and it definitely has hardware 3D-acceleration ?

nelshh said:
Oh C'mon, I've used this phone for a while now and it definitely has hardware 3D-acceleration ?
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How would that be possible when it will be out only late 2008?

Pre-release version like the one I've been using. They have been out for a while now.
Though it's super fast and runs psb Shell with no delay, I don't think it has 3D acceleration. Just a really fast chip.

For those of you that have the pre release version, could one of you comment on how good the dpad would be for palying games? I'm a big fan of snes emulation gaming. I looked at the touchpro yesterday and passed on it because the dpad is unusable for gaming
Many Thanks

The white paper clearly states 3D Harware Acceleration - Yes!

Which Bluetooth stack?
Info on bluetooth profiles looks, good, but:
Does it use Microsoft or Broadcom/Widcomm bluetooth stacks?

No idea, but under Device Info, this is what the description is:
Bluetooth version: 2.0/2.0+EDR
Hope that helps.

Thx tjex. Maybe there's someone here who can confirm?
Nightcookie said:
Does it use Microsoft or Broadcom/Widcomm bluetooth stacks?
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"Though it's super fast and runs psb Shell with no delay, I don't think it has 3D acceleration. Just a really fast chip."
but does psb shell really support 3d ?
even normal windows desktop dont and only very little support for few features in vista
which dont even seem to be that fast
so i can see games having support not all though warcraft2 duke3d hexen heretic doom1-2 quake1-3 i've come across dont
so pure gui in windows mobile would not benefit
could benefit from 2d acceleration mainly with video and effects like
touchflow though
a lot of general hype about 3d around on pc's too people who get a fancy video card for photoshop or youtube and the likes

It's been requested before, but can someone who already has their hands on an X1 post screenshots of 3rd party software? I'd love to see how that looks - Spb programs, navigation -anything!
Thx!

I'll do it for you, what software do you want to see and I am to assume that SmartSS is the best way to get a screen cap?
I'm still quite green with this whole wm thing
edit: nvm figured it out

Thanks for coming in on this, tjex!
tjex said:
what software do you want to see
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Anything from Spb would be good (free trials if you don't have the programs ), and any navigation software you have available. And any other cool goodies you can think of!
N.

please please please try installing manila on it. I wonder if it will install to start with, what framerate you will get and what will happen with the screen (stretched or cut-off on the bottom)
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=2195963
http://www.4shared.com/file/47016031/5436a738/manila1001030release.html

I posted some screenshots as requested here:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=422137
I'll give Manila a try and report back.

Someone who used had a proto mentioned that 'after heavy usage or constant sliding, the plastic ain't that reliable, sounds creaky'. That the same case for those of you who too have protos?

[Q]

Would it be possible to make panels that are dedicated to certain apps like core player or morphgear which could then take advantage of the graphics via the new sdk? Would be a lot better if we could get some use out of the ati graphics...or would it not work like that. I tried searching on google but couldnt find much.
http://developer.sonyericsson.com/site/global/newsandevents/latestnews/newsfeb09/p_xperia_sdk_opengles_update.jsp

Afaik, hardware acceleration can only be achieved if the software developer gets the info they need from Qualcomm. Coreplayer is still working on it and morphgear.. don't count on it.
The panels won't be able to help here, you can have the panel itself accelerated, but not the app running inside.

hey Angelusz, sorry about not replying sooner mate!
This driver thing is a serious problem...if I knew how crippled the x1 was...I dont think i would have purchased it.
The new 3d game by sony is, lets be honset, ****e. I have more fun playing emulated games and these fancy 3d ones with zero playability. I just wish that we could make the x1 as good as it should be.
Is there word/hope that this could be fixed? Are there guys in other parts of xda working on a fix...which could also help us x1 users?

Some 3d performance increased can be achieved through installing other drivers (for instance the omnia's, diamond's, or better yet the Rhodium's.
2d.. I have no idea how to work that out though. It's a problem all MSMxxxx CPU's from Qualcomm have, including the diamond, touch pro and touch HD. I'm not sure about the Rhodium and Blue Topaz, but I'm guessing they're using the same chip as the X1 and touch HD.

Would it be possible for some clever guys(s) to make a driver from scratch? I noticed a post in offering a bounty for the first person to achieve the goal would get all the $$$. Cause I know that a lot of x1 owners (and prob other htc users) would all chip in for such a worthy cause.
...or should I just face facts that its never gonna happen
Thanks for replying to all my questions, im new to the ppc thing and still cant get my head round the fact that they have crippled our phone. Games on the iphone look upto psp standards!

High Expectations

Hi
With the inminent release of HTC HD 2 with the new HTC Sense interface and Windows Mobile 6.5 .....
does this means we will have our HD´s finally running smooth and clean?
Better kinetic scrolling, less bugs and lags?
Refined cooked roms maybe?
Or our phones are doomed because of the actual 528 mhz processor?
Any comments??

just wait and see what our Chefs and Devs are going to do with the Leo/HD2 ROM. Only after that we can say/decide whether or HD is going to be doomed because af the old processor.

It looks quite obvious. It's not the processor or otherwise the hardware which cause the HD to be far from smooth. The Hero has got the same hardware but due to Android it runs completely smooth - I was shocked about the speed when I play-tested in the shop!
This led me to the following conclusions:
- the driver issue due to (a lack of ?) agreements between Qualcomm and HTC ;
- WM is a heavy-weight OS which does not go easy on resources -> it's simply not normal that you need a 1GHz processor plus a lot of RAM to run WM 6.1 smoothly. That's the typical Microsoft overload.
->> Don't expect your HD to become faster due to the Leo phenomenon. Sure, this community will always do its best (e.g. improving drivers, optimizing ROMs, etc.) but there are certain limits beyond which nothing can be done anymore ...

There is no connection. The HD2 will have completely different hardware so it's not like we can steal drivers from the new phone. Hence, this means nothing. Our phone is doomed unless there is some major breakthrough on the user developed driver's side, which I'm getting less and less optimistic about. I sincerely apologise for my bad mood...

Have you tried a good lightweight ROM (such as http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=472972) before deciding your phone is doomed?
If you haven't, I urge you to try it. The lag from the stock ROM and most other bloated ROMs just disappeared after I installed this one.
Also, due to Windows Mobile being very extensible, it's quite easy to add whatever you need to this bare bones ROM.

I'll try that, thank you for the hint. What I meant is sure, you can strip it down to make it the fastest possible, but this won't give us back the hardware we paid for and we are not using. It's like having a super video card on your pc but being forced to use the preexistent onboard vga because nobody developed a driver for your new hardware.

OpenGL games are running slow on HD2?

So far i have tried NFS undercover, Flight commander and Boom Blox.
They are all running with some lag. not smooth at all.
Is anyone else noticing this?
Update: I just hard reset my device to see if the problem is caused by something i installed. After a hard reset the OpenGL games are still lagging which is very frustrating. I had the TG01 before and all these games were running fine. what a huge disappointed from the HD2!

Ya the Phone is quite new just yet even HTC admitted the original ROM's performance is not what it should be and are working on an update. It should be sorted soon so don't panic
Also as soon as the SPL is cracked and the modders start playing with ROMs, expect to see performance improve even more than stock ROMs

^^^^^^
It's simply unacceptable for us or HTC to expect people to patch things up through hacking their phones by SPL and installing custom ROMs from XDA.
I reckon that less than half of future HD2 owners will know how to flash custom ROMs into their phones.
This is quite a dissapointing news indeed...these things should work out of the box.

jagnet said:
Ya the Phone is quite new just yet even HTC admitted the original ROM's performance is not what it should be and are working on an update.
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I only see something similar on italian rom not the others.

Let's try to narrow this down a little as i think there is a problem with the drivers on the device. the HD2 itself is super fast, it is just opengl games that lag.
If you own an HD2 please post if you see a lag when playing OpenGL games, the name of the game and your ROM version.
If you do not see a lag please post the same.
I am using WWE 1.43.479.2 ROM and treid the follwing:
NFS undercover: lags in portrait, less lag in landscape.
Boom Blox: Lags in both portrait and landscape
Flight commander: Lags in landscape
Tower Defence: lags in landscape
Xtrakt: no lag at all
Electopia (openGL ES 2.0): no lag

It could be due to the fact that games like NFS were written for MSM72xx processors specifically and have their own drivers that don't work well with Snapdragon...

Just to clear up a few misconceptions:
- HTC has acknowledged that there are performance issues with a particular ROM, however, as far as we know, these performance issues have absolutely nothing to do with OpenGL games. They affect the HD2's general performance doing non-3D stuff. So far as one can tell, these issues don't seem to affect the British version of the phone. They were discovered by an Italian site. Distribution of HD2's in Italy has been halted. I heard one rumour that the same thing has happened in France.
- HTC never puts proper hardware drivers on their phones - never has and quite possibly never will. If you check out this website you'll see that complaints about lack of proper drivers on HTC phones date back a good three years, and pretty much every phone HTC has ever made has had similar issues. If you go back four or more years, there were no drivers then either; but the hardware HTC bought from Qualcomm ran (for its time) fairly fast even without them, so it wasn't too much of an issue. The trouble started when Qualcomm's latest hardware didn't reach its advertised level of performance without proper drivers.
Three years ago, nothing ran with proper acceleration on HTC's phones, not even HTC's own software. Nowadays the software that is actually built into the phone can make use of hardware acceleration, but third party software that you install yourself typically can't.
This doesn't just apply to 3D acceleration, it causes problems with (for example) video playback on most HTC phones; Coreplayer (3rd party video player) runs a lot slower than HTCAlbum or Windows Media Player on HTC phones, but it runs faster on many other phones. (This is unlikely to be a practical problem on the HD2, as the CPU is powerful enough that Coreplayer can play anything you might reasonably want to play using the CPU alone; but it's a real problem on phones like the original Touch HD, the Touch Diamond2 and Touch Pro2).
- The blame for this is (arguably) shared between HTC and Qualcomm (the company that makes the chips HTC uses in its phones). Qualcomm has several different prices that they charge for their chips, depending on the level of software support that you buy with them. As I understand it, HTC chooses to pay the amount which allows their own software to get proper hardware support, but they won't pay the more expensive rate which would allow them to make a phone which offers hardware acceleration to third party products. (By contrast, Toshiba pays the full rate). To what extent this is HTC's fault for not paying and to what extent it is Qualcomm's fault for charging more than HTC can afford is unclear.
- The chances of anyone on XDA dev reverse-engineering an OpenGL driver for the Snapdragon chipset in the near future are, I would say, fairly slim. It's not impossible: a guy called Neo has produced a Direct3D driver for the older Qualcomm chipset used in phones like the Touch Pro and Touch Pro2. (See here). However, it's not on a par with what Qualcomm would produce, even after several years of work.
- It's possible that someone might be able to rip off a driver by stealing files from the ROM image of a TG01 or a NeoTouch - however, even if that worked, that would be illegal. Such a driver couldn't be distributed via this website or even advertised on it, otherwise Qualcomm would sue the website for intellectual property theft. So, if you really want to get the entire XDA developers website permanently shut down, then a good way to go about it would be to post here asking for someone to produce a pirated driver.
- The game Xtrakt is designed to directly access Qualcomm hardware; effectively it bundles a 3D library and a hard-wired driver within the game itself, rather than depending on support from the software on the phone. Consequently, the fact that Xtrakt runs smoothly doesn't mean that the phone can accelerate anything else. It's too early to be certain, but it looks as though Electopia may use the same approach.
- The upshot of all this is that I wouldn't get your hopes up for proper 3D acceleration on the HD2 in the foreseeable future.
EDIT: Note that the above is correct as I understand it but if you feel you have a better understanding than I do on any of these points, then feel free to correct me!

vangrieg said:
It could be due to the fact that games like NFS were written for MSM72xx processors specifically and have their own drivers that don't work well with Snapdragon...
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Click to collapse
Xtrakt was written specifically for MSM72xx processors, and (according to this thread) is lag-free on the HD2. (Unless there's a Snapdragon-specific version of it that I'm not aware of). I would speculate that it's the other way round - games with hard-wired acceleration (like Xtrakt and possibly Electopia) run okay, but anything which expects the platform to handle 3D acceleration doesn't.
techdave said:
It's simply unacceptable for us or HTC to expect people to patch things up through hacking their phones by SPL and installing custom ROMs from XDA.
I reckon that less than half of future HD2 owners will know how to flash custom ROMs into their phones.
This is quite a dissapointing news indeed...these things should work out of the box.
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I find it hard to disgagree with any of that.

but i do see the drivers under the Windows folder. they file names are identical to those in the tg01 so the drivers are there fit the games only the games don't run very well.
they do however run very well on the tg01

AFAIK, NFS also comes with its own driver. I may be wrong though.

techdave said:
^^^^^^
It's simply unacceptable for us or HTC to expect people to patch things up through hacking their phones by SPL and installing custom ROMs from XDA.
I reckon that less than half of future HD2 owners will know how to flash custom ROMs into their phones.
This is quite a dissapointing news indeed...these things should work out of the box.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
come on guys, this happen to all kind of phones and it is absolutely normal, where on earth anyone of us see a perfect phone with perfect rom???? are you guys just expecting too much?? give HTC some time, HD2 is easily the best phone ever made and I would consider it is finally a good phone in the decade?

precsmo said:
come on guys, this happen to all kind of phones and it is absolutely normal, where on earth anyone of us see a perfect phone with perfect rom???? are you guys just expecting too much?? give HTC some time, HD2 is easily the best phone ever made and I would consider it is finally a good phone in the decade?
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That's some nice sweet talking there. HTC won't do anything if it's not affecting the general performance of the phone. It's the same as with my current phone the Polaris. HTC never did anything, even when many many ppl complained about bad 3D performance. If there was any real alternative to the HD2 I wouldn't buy from HTC again.
So I suppose it's not a big deal that WM doesn't have many modern 3D games, because the HD2 won't be able to run them smooth anyway.
EDIT: @Shasarak: Thanks for post #7. I agree and think you hit bullseye.

precsmo said:
come on guys, this happen to all kind of phones and it is absolutely normal, where on earth anyone of us see a perfect phone with perfect rom???? are you guys just expecting too much??
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Click to collapse
There's a colossal difference between expecting a ROM to be "perfect" and mererly expecting it not to contain any major bugs. The latter is entirely reasonable. There's also nothing unreasonable about expecting hardware to be shipped with the drivers needed to use it properly (if that does turn out to be the problem here).

Shasarak said:
There's a colossal difference between expecting a ROM to be "perfect" and mererly expecting it not to contain any major bugs. The latter is entirely reasonable. There's also nothing unreasonable about expecting hardware to be shipped with the drivers needed to use it properly (if that does turn out to be the problem here).
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I agree but be advised that the drivers are there..they just for some reason don't perform very well.
On the other hand the drivers on the TG01 were performing very well with the games i tested (but the device was very buggy and poorly built, thus i don't have it anymore), so maybe we can copy the drivers from the TG01 to the HD2 and it will work well?

so much for the god of mobile CPU's in the snapdragon....

Then again, it's not snapdragon's fault..

niknik76 said:
Then again, it's not snapdragon's fault..
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Yeah - the the TG01 has a Snapdragon chipset too, but the games work on that - the problem is specific to the HD2, it's not a problem with Snapdragon phones in general.

vangrieg said:
AFAIK, NFS also comes with its own driver. I may be wrong though.
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Click to collapse
Well, you could be right; but if you are, and that's what's causing the problem, then why does it run lag-free on a TG01 but not on an HD2?

Shasarak said:
So, if you really want to get the entire XDA developers website permanently shut down, then a good way to go about it would be to post here asking for someone to produce a pirated driver.
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clubtech said:
so maybe we can copy the drivers from the TG01 to the HD2 and it will work well?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

Producing a pirated driver, hosting it here, and someone copying drivers from a TG01 to a HD2 are two different things right?

Serious Performance Issues (Sense 2.5 Music Landscape) - possible solution ?

Well, as I am using Sense 2.5 on a Touch Pro2, I do know that I cannot expect it to run fast, but I'm curious whether it is possible to remove some "effects", like the reflection of cover arts in the music tab, to speed the whole thing up a bit.
Any input greatly appreciated!

The only response I got when I asked that question was that we do not have the snap dragon processor....sounded like a bogus answer to me.

Why would that be a bogus answer? We're still talking about a device that's almost twice (!) as fast (only counting mhz). I can imagine that Sense2.5 compared to 2.1 asks for more processing power.
I've tried different 2.5 and 2.1 roms, and although I really love the 2.5 interface I'd rather have a snappy device. I did try to run utilities like ram cleaning/advanced config/etc to try and make the ui run faster, but it wasn't sufficient enough for me. The reason to try out some 2.5 roms was the integration of the music player, contacts tab and other nifty changes like entering an appointment. I really hope these will be available in the future as a separate cab or something.

The snapdragon processor is more than twice as fast than our old clunker msm72xx, in benchmarks and nearly in sheer mhz. Check out the benchmarks yourselves, the Snapdragon destroys our in every category. Also, chainfire has made some modifications to the snapdragon driver which in some areas has more than doubled performance.
http://www.mobiletechworld.com/2009/09/28/htc-leo-hd2-benchmarks/
http://pocketnow.com/thought/competitive-benchmarks-hd-vs-hd2
Overall the HD2 ousts the HD (runs a msm720x same as our TP2) by 275% overall and nearly 2000% in specific categories. Then as I said, chainfire has boosted the snapdragon abilities well beyond stock.
Seen here : http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=592663
Amazing work.
There isn't a slight difference, there is a huge difference, the Snapdragon takes our msm720x to town and back again.

What I meant by that was I find it hard to believe that our current processor could not handle something as simple as making the manila graphics in both the music and pics tab snappier when going from portrait to landscape. think about it. we need a processor thats twice as fast as our to handle that? thats what I meant by bogus.

I do not understand what is in the slightest bit bogus. The software (m2.5) wasn't designed or optimized for our current hardware, how could we ever expect it to run as fast as it does for the hardware it was deisgned for? Esp when the hardware it was designed for is more than twice as fast as our current hardware...
This is like unto complaining that your old PII Dell desktop doesn't run Crysis well, I'm sorry but the argument has no grounds.

ok........
Scrtcwlvl said:
I do not understand what is in the slightest bit bogus. The software (m2.5) wasn't designed or optimized for our current hardware, how could we ever expect it to run as fast as it does for the hardware it was deisgned for? Esp when the hardware it was designed for is more than twice as fast as our current hardware...
This is like unto complaining that your old PII Dell desktop doesn't run Crysis well, I'm sorry but the argument has no grounds.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

I think you misunderstood my question in the first place ...
I'm not aiming to complain about Sense 2.5 not running as fast on a Touch Pro2 as on a HD2, I simply asked, whether it was possible (with some capabilities in editing manila files) to remove effects, like the reflection of album arts or animations or something similiar, to speed it up.
I don't want a miracle to happen, I'm just asking whether the effects can be customized to make them appropriate for our device (performance wise).
As I have seen that in the new max 2.6 beta the flip animation on the homescreen was removed due to lacking perfomance on the Touch Pro2/HD for example, I thought that this might be possible.
Hope somebody who doesn't just want to tell me the performance difference of the Pro2/HD2 might answer me ^^