Sony XPERIA X1 Official Price, New Panels now Available

I’ve got good news and bad news for all your Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 hopefully owners out there. The good news is that the XPERIA X1 is now available in Sony Ericsson concept stores which means its official price is out as well. The bad news is that it’s higher than what we were expecting. Its SRP is P42500 to be exact; much more expensive than a 3G iPhone 8GB prepaid kit or a Samsung Omnia, but still cheaper than an HTC Touch Pro.

On a similar note, Sony Ericsson has launched two new panels for the XPERIA X1. The Facebook panel allows users to seamlessly integrate their Facebook account with their mobile phone. It even comes with call to contacts functionality. The Windows Live panel, on the other hand, provides you with an easy way to sync and import your Windows Live contacts to your XPERIA X1’s phonebook. It also gives you an easy access to Windows Live Messenger and Hotmail. These two new exciting panels that will definitely enable you to get the most out of your XPERIA X1.

So now that the XPERIA X1 is finally out, will you be getting yours soon or will you be waiting for something better to come out in 2009?

Nokia 6260 slide: First S40-based Phone with GPS

If you’re looking for a little something more powerful than the budget-friendly phones we previewed last week, the recently launched Nokia 6260 slide might just be the phone for you.

It’s set to debut in early 2009 and while it may not be an Nseries phone, it comes with a bunch of features that are commonly associated with multimedia line of Nokia. The Nokia 6260 slide comes with a 5-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens and LED flash, WiFi, 3G/HSDPA connectivity up to 10.2 Mbps, and Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP. It also comes with GPS with A-GPS making the 6260 slide the first S40-based phone to come with such a feature. Likewise, it has TV-out functionality, stereo speakers and comes with 200MB internal memory and supports microSD card technology for additional storage. Despite its lowly S40 software, the Nokia 6260 is nonetheless a truly full-featured slider that can definitely match up with its heftier Nseries siblings.

It’s expected to cost €299 or close to P19K (converted using the current exchange rate) before taxes and subsidies. It seems a bit expensive for an S40 device, but considering the features it comes with, it might just be worth considering.

UPDATE: Sad news guys as this one won’t be relased by Nokia Philippines. Hopefully, something that’s equally delightful (and full-featured) will replace it as part of the 2009 line-up of Nokia phones in the country.

Mobile Internet Browser Face-Off

With most mobile phones featuring internet browsing capabilities, choosing which phone offers the best mobile internet experience is a pretty daunting task. It’s a good thing though that Gizmodo has come out with a very juicy comparison to help us out. It may be a very limited comparison leaving out the likes of the HTC Touch Pro and XPERIA X1 out of the picture, but it is, nevertheless very informative.

As you can see with their scores, the iPhone is still the best among the rest despite lacking Flash support. Garnering a B+ score is the HTC G1 with the Android OS while both the BlackBerry Bold and Nokia E71 got a B-.

The table below shows how all the phones fared using a 3G connection. Page rendering is denoted by a Poor to Excellent rating while the color (green is good; red is poor) takes into account both speed and page rendering accuracy.

This second table show how each phone performs under a WiFi connection.

All-in-all, it was a pretty interesting showdown. Some lived up to their expectation while some failed miserably. Safe to say, if mobile internet browsing is your kind of thing, then it seems that it’s best to go with the iPhone albeit lacking support for flash. For more details about the results and how they conducted the test, you can check out Gizmodo.

How about you guys? Which mobile phone do you think provides the best mobile internet experience?