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Sony Ericsson has updated its Xperia range of phones with Facebook inside Xperia. It’s a series of customisations to the Android operating system to better integrate facebook into Google’s mobile OS. It’s available on any Xperia handset that was launched with, or has been updated to, Android 2.3. This includes the new Xperia Arc and the upcoming Xperia mini and mini pro handsets, among others. Unlike HTC’s Facebook phones (Cha Cha and Salsa), there won’t be any Facebook branding on the outside of handsets, instead it’s a rather more subtle affair and one that will soon be omnipresent across the lineup.
All of these additions are easy to get up-and-running on your phone, you simply have to log into Facebook using the usual Android app, and then all the extra features are activated. You can access settings for these in the Sync app, where you’ll see two Facebook symbols, you’ll want the icon with the three buttons at the bottom. Here you can turn on or off the gallery, contacts and calendar syncing.
TUNE-FUSION
Essentially this adds a Like button to the built-in media player, so you can Like tracks you’re listening to at the touch of a button. The system uses web service Track ID to recognise the track you’re listening to and then put a post on your Facebook wall with the correct details and a link back to Track IDs page with the track details. It works well enough, most of the time, but there are occasional hiccups.
We tried to Like one of the tracks that came pre-loaded on the phone, and Track ID got the wrong end of the stick and posted that we were enjoying some strange Japanese pop track we’d never heard of. It’s not a huge deal for us, but if you live-and-die by your considered musical taste, then using the button could be a risky business, and having to go to Facebook to check on the post defeats the point of it entirely.
In short, it’s a good idea, but it could do with pulling the info from TrackID and displaying it in a pop-up before you confirm it.
MEDIA-TASM
Next up is the Media Discovery app, which pulls in all the media-related stuff that your friends have liked on Facebook. In our case this consisted of a big list of ‘comedic’ YouTube videos that our mates have linked to.
Select one of these and you get a screen that loads the video and shows what comments your friends and their friends have made about it – which adds a bit of context. It works just fine and is a good way of killing a few minutes on public transport, when you know what you want is media to enjoy, rather than tittle-tattle of status updates. Not a huge deal, but we did find ourselves using it more than we’d expected.
GALLERY-BOOK
This is by far our favourite part of Facebook inside Xperia. Essentially it integrates your Facebook photo folders with the phone’s own photo gallery. So you can browse through your Facebook photos alongside any you’ve taken with the phone’s camera or those you’ve copied across yourself. The Facebook folders are marked with the usual icon, so you can tell which are which, but except for that it’s all seamless. The gallery is pretty well-designed anyway, with little piles of photos representing each folder.
The Facebook photos are downloaded from the web automatically, whenever you have an internet connection. Thumbnails are cached on the memory card in the handset, but it appears that only low-res thumbnails are cached of all your pictures; to get full-res versions you have to have selected them at some point when you have an internet connection to get them cached.
We couldn’t find the files anywhere on the memory card when we looked, and nor are we sure how many photos it will cache and what happens if you have thousands of images on Facebook, bu for our relatively small collection of a few hundred it worked well. For each image from Facebook you can also see any comments that have been made on it, and you can Like it using a simple single button press.
TIME AND FACE
The calendar also benefits from Facebook integration, with Birthdays and events appearing. Unfortunately, the Xperia calendar is pretty poor, and you have to drill down into each day from the monthly view to see events. We prefer the excellent Touch Calendar, which lets you zoom in and out while scaling the text of the entries in each day to show as much as possible – Touch Calendar can also show the Facebook calendar, so Sony Ericsson needs to step up its game in this area.
Facebook also integrates with your contacts. On the surface this looks great, with Facebook contacts appearing in your contact list, go into these and you get the person’s Facebook image and you can see their interests listed on the site, plus there’s a photos tab so you can browse their public photo folders.
It all works really well, but it’s a little let down by Xperia’s own time-consuming contact integration method – where you have to manually join contacts by holding a long press and then selecting join. This can be very time consuming if you have 3 or 4 entries (phone, Facebook, Google and Exchange) for many individuals, and some sort of automated system would be really handy.
In conclusion then, Facebook inside Xperia has some very useful additions, some of which are perfectly formed (the gallery), some of which need some slight tweaks (such as liking music) and some of which could be great but are let down by less than stellar design in the Xperia take on Android (contacts). Still, for Facebook fans there’s a lot to like here, and it’s a definite step forward for Sony Ericsson’s range of handsets.
