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Nexus One VS Xperia X10
 
They have similar form factor, huge screens (4 inch for Xperia X10 and 3.7 inch for Nexus One). In this comparisson of Nexus One vs Xperia X10 we will show you the advantages of one phone over the other and ease your decision.
But first let's clear up the "Google Phone" status of the Nexus One: it is sold by Google but was made by HTC, has HTC branding on the back and ships from HTC so in the end it's just a top of the line HTC smartphone.
So what we compare here are two top of the line Android phones with similar specs, similar form factor and same OS, making it even harder to decide which one takes the prize.
HARDWARE
Exterior
As you can see in the picture above, as well as in the specs sheet, Xperia is slightly wider (by 3.2 mm) and thicker (by 1.5 mm) than the Nexus One, both phones having the same height of 119 mm. In defense of the Xperia X10 we have to say that the larger frame is required to house the larger screen.
Exact dimensions of the phones are:
Nexus One: 119 x 59.8 x 11.5 mm
Xperia X10: 119 x 63 x 13 mm
As they say beauty is in the eye of the beholder so we won't comment on esthetics of the phones, although we preffer the slimmer, simple shape of the Nexus.
Xperia comes from a great manufacturer, with years of experience and it shows: it has a modern design, great finishing, ergonomic shape and excelent build quality. HTC on the other hand is a younger player in the phone market but they had a great start in the smartphone niche and all signs point they will be the leaders of this market in the following years. No wonder Google chose them to make the G1, the first Android phone and now the first phone sold by Google directly.
The Nexus is, as some reviewers pointed, "lustworthy". It keeps the design lines of other HTC smartphones but does everything in a simple, cleaner way, resulting an almost perfect shape. We say almost perfect because we are not too happy about the two tone paintjob. We do love however the teflon paint that makes the phone feel rubbery and not so slippery or fingerprint friendly as Xperia's glossy finish.
Neither phone has a phisical keyboard so they are even at this chapter, either if you love or hate them for that. They do however have a few phisical buttons, like most smartphones of the day: volume control, power button and of course Android buttons (Home, Menu, Back and Search). Xperia has these as hardware buttons while the Nexus has some Droid like touch sensors at the bottom of the screen. On the device tested these were not verry acurate, sometimes being pressed by accident while typing.
What Nexus One has, and we wonder why, is a hardware trackball and quite a large one we may say. If someone found a use for this trackball drop a comment below cause I, in almost a year using a HTC Magic never found out why it is there. Neither did some coworkers of mine that have Heroes. We know it can be used for navigation but it is unconfortable to use and imprecise and useless on a device that has a touchscreen.
Overall Nexus takes the cake in design and build quality followed closely by Xperia.
When it comes to the display it is a tough decision between the two phones, we expected this to be a nobrainer since the Nexus has an OLED display but, despite the obvious advantages of the OLED, there are some downsides like over saturated colors and poor visibility in the daylight. Xperia on the other hand, although it uses the "outdated" LCD technology has the advantage of a larger screen, both in size (4 inch vs 3.7 inch) and in resolution (854 instead of 800x480). You might say the extra 54 pixels hight is not that important and you'll be right, even though you may never complain about too much screen real estate, especially on a mobile phone. Like we said it is hard to pick a winner in this department but we'll go with the Nexus since we love OLED (and saturated colors).
Multi-touch you ask? Well.. not yet. Even though both phones are hardware and software capable of multi-touch the feature is not enabled, probably for licensing or other obscure legal reasons. Bummer but at least they are equal at this chapter and there is always hope that this will be solved via a future update.
Internals
We're working on a tab that will give you full specs of these phones side by side, but until then we'll give you a few highlights: both phones share the same processor, the 1 GHz Snapdragon, the best smartphone processor on the market, thus making the performances sky high. No winner in this section, or we'd better say both are the winers.
Same as in computers, performance is also influenced by the amount of memory, and Nexus One has a slight advantage over Xperia, having 512 MB of RAM vs. 256 MB in the X10. When it comes to storage, Xperia leads on the internal storage capacity with 1 GB versus the 512 MB found in the Nexus, which is a major advantage, since at the moment apps can't be installed on the SD card. Perhaps future software updates will fix that, but in the meantime the extra memory will come in handy. Xperia comes a little short on the microSD department, accepting only cards up to 16 GB, while the Nexus can take up to 32 GB cards.
Camera is one aspect where Xperia has no competition, and will not have any for a long time. Its 8.1 MP camera with great optics is hard to beat, even though HTC improved their camera technology and added an excelent 5MP camera in the Nexus. Both phones have LED flash. Video recording is limited on the Xperia at 640x480 while the Nexus can record 720x480 DVD quality video.
And since all that performance and huge screens need some serious power both phones come equipped with excelent batteries, 1400 mAh in the Nexus and 1500 mAh in the Xperia.
Both phones come with GPS (it is actually a no brainer at this level) but because of the OS version only the Nexus One has turn-by-turn navigation. WiFi, Bluetooth, 3.5 mm jack and microUSB found in both phones cover all your conectivity necesities.
SOFTWARE
Nexus One runs stock Android 2.1 with all the advantages it brings while Xperia X10 has a custom SE interface build on Android 1.6. The major drawback of this is that it does not have Google Navigation installed. Future updates might also be harder to implement. Maybe by the time it will be available on the market, sometime in February we hope, it will come with an updated version of Android OS.
WRAP-UP
If you haven't already figured out from the review above we liked the Nexus. This is pretty uncommon to like a phone that's already released better than one that is still unavailable, but Google and HTC really hit the nail on this one, the Nexus, with it's slim shape, OLED screen and Android 2.1 being the closest to our smartphone ideal. That doesn't mean that Xperia isn't a great phone, on the contrary, but we just liked Nexus more.
HIGHLIGHTS
Nexus One
 Android 2.1
OLED display
Turn-by-turn GPS
 We're still looking
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Sony Ericsson Xperia X10
8.1 MP camera
4 inch display
Android 1.6
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