Esato

Sony Ericsson X1 Xperia review

January 2009
By Olav Hellesø-Knutsen

GPS, maps and navigation

Sony Ericsson X1 has Google Maps pre-installed on the device. The navigation software Wayfinder Navigator is included on the CD-ROM and not installed by default. Google Maps are mostly use for address lookup while Wayfinder Navigator is a complete car navigation suite. Both applications are by default set up to use the built-in Assisted GPS (A-GPS) hardware. A-GPS is a traditional GPS receiver with additional and faster way to get the current location. I do not have any good personal experience with Wayfinder. In my opinion, this particular navigation software has always been a little sluggish. If comparing it to Google Maps by dragging the map image across the screen you will see that Google Maps is in another league. Google Maps just works. Using the search function makes you wonder what Google has done to achieve the instant response time. It might be that Google have a couple of more map servers running and that they are spread around the world just to speed up the response time. None of the two applications has the maps stored locally in the device, so you need to be online via GPRS, EDGE, 3G or WLAN to download the maps in realtime.

Google Maps and Wayfinder
Google Maps and Wayfinder

The Google Maps application is integrated with Windows Mobile system. A nice feature is where you find and navigate to an addresses using the contact list. Every address book entries with a registered street address can be easily looked up in Google Map by selecting the address and click on a menu item.




In use -->