HTC Designed & Built The First Xperia Phone
The very first Xperia. Released in 2008, this came out during one of the most disruptive years for smartphones. With its unusual origins, I've wanted to explore this model for a long time. I have had one for a while. But it's amazingly worn out. Look at this! Someone really used this phone until it almost disintegrated. The LCD lights up, but it's got some discoloration.
Most likely from water damage. And the touchcreen doesn't work. In good condition these can be quite expensive to buy. But I enjoy a good challenge. So to fix this one I've been on the lookout for parts for a long time. A while ago I was given this secondhand replacement LCD. Which itself looks old and decayed. But I was told it does at least work. However for me a phone like this needs to do more than just work. It also needs to look good. Which is why I was very
excited to recently have gotten this. It's a new steel front and housing. I consider this a very lucky find. I also got a replacement keypad. Condition of the keypad is not new, but it's quite decent. I should now have enough parts to get this phone together finally. First, I need to clean this replacement LCD. I can't believe how dirty this thing is. But it
looks like it's cleaning up nicely. It looks like it's got quite a bit of scratching on the front, but nothing major. Importantly it also comes with the ribbon cable that goes through the slide mechanism. These are known to wear out, so having a replacement already attached to the LCD is going to make this much easier. This is the phone that Sony Ericsson used to launch their Xperia brand. And despite being a Sony Ericsson, this phone was wholly designed and built by HTC. This phone was announced only a few months after the iPhone was released.
And I do wonder if that had something to do with Sony Ericsson deciding to jump in the high-end smartphone market with something new, by choosing an off-the-shelf HTC design, and then simply putting their brand on it and releasing it quickly into the market. It's quite a departure from their previous smartphone, the P1 from 2007. Which ran Symbian. Wow, this plastic casing is falling apart. This phone runs on a 528 MHz ARM 11 CPU and 256 MGB of
RAM. But it's that LCD that's really impressive. At 480 x 800 pixels, this display has a higher resolution than even the original iPhone. Overall this is quite an elegant design. And I see some of the reasons why Sony Ericsson decided to go with it. That old ribbon cable does look worn.
I wonder if that's contributing to problems. I'm glad this phone saw a lot of use. Someone must have used this phone for quite a while. The main board is tight. One side has few components, but mostly just these gold pads. This is when gold was a fair bit cheaper and manufacturers tended to put more gold in their phones. Most of the internals of this phone are hidden under these cans under the label. Lifting them up and we can see it's mostly just Qualcomm chips. At
the time HTC were an OEM manufacturer. They didn't have much of a presence in the market under their own brand and they would often produce phones for other companies. Later on for example including Google. When they designed and built Google's first phone the Nexus One. There's a lot of conductive tape inside this display section that I have to carefully remove some of. From what I've seen this sort of conductive tape seems to be a common feature inside HTC phones. I don't think this is a great design choice for repairability. The
tape can lose much of its stickiness when trying to reassemble. I'm pleased the replacement LCD already has a cable and I don't have to disconnect the ribbon cable and I can leave a lot of that tape on there. I also need to get the front camera and the earpiece transferred over. OK, so far it's looking good. Plugging this ribbon cable into the mainboard is really difficult. There's not much clearance and I can hardly see what's going on. It took me quite a few goes to get this plug back in. For final reassembly I still have to use the rear plastic frame from the broken unit, because that's all I have. I'll just have to very carefully put these broken sections back in.
Fortunately the broken plastic sections are hidden by the metal battery cover, so I'm not too concerned with that damage. OK, putting the battery back in the phone and pressing the power button. Let's see what we've got. OK it's doing something and it's looking good! The display seems to be working fine and the phone is booting up.
And most importantly the touch screen is now working! And wow this phone is beautiful :) It's great to see this phone up and running. It feels amazing I usually prefer devices when they come in the black option. But I think here the steel framing looks much better. It's heavy and solid in the hand. And that beautiful stainless steel construction is just perfect. It also helps with flux dispersal. One of the signature aspects of the design is the way the slide curves as it opens. The mechanism has been built on curved rails. And the curve gives the phone a really
unique look and feel. This is very much a premium phone of its time. There's a micro SD card slot for expanding the inbuilt 512 MB of storage and of course a headphone socket. There's also four multiolor LED indicators, two on each side of the display. This allows you to see them from any direction. And it looks like this is running Windows Mobile 6.5. This phone was only released with 6.1.So this must have been upgraded at some point. At the time there weren't many other options for mobile operating systems. Palm OS was well dead by this point. Nokia was still sticking
to the Symbian operating system and Android had not yet been released. Leaving Windows Mobile as one of the few remaining options. I'm keen to try out this operating system. The problem for me now is the phone is running in Chinese, which I can't read. And these versions of Windows Mobile were regional single language only releases. So they don't give you any option to switch to any other language. The only way to fix this is to completely reflash the phone with another ROM.
One way to do this would be to find an officially released ROM compatible with this variant of the phone. But I don't like my chances of finding official ROMs today for this phone. The good news is there's another way that I much prefer, and I'm going to do a bootloader unlock. This will enable me to flash any ROM version including custom ROMs. And this will also give extra protections against
possible bricking. To do this I just need to delve into the HTC modding scene. Because of course this phone is at its heart an HTC. The software I need is called Hard SPL or Hard Secondary Program Loader. Fortunately everything I need is available by digging into the archives of the XDA forums. I'm so glad these forums still exist and they're even still active today. There's a wealth of knowledge here about modding smartphones, going all the way back to the early 2000s. The first thing I need to do is connect this phone to a computer that's running Windows Mobile Device Center. To get this running I've selected a laptop running Windows 7. This software does
not run on Windows 10. Trust me I've tried. The hard SPL bootloader is installed using a modified version of HTC's own Radio Update Utility. Which includes a special version of the bootloader. Unfortunately when trying it I am getting update error 262. One of the advantages of doing this today is many of these early problems have been solved, and you just need to find the right posts. It turns out the X1 that I have here has a later bootloader version 1.05. Which
blocks bootloader downgrading. To get past this I need to install and run a program on the phone called Xperia XXPL. It's a bit tricky because I don't understand Chinese. But following the icons I'm able to get to the file manager and navigate to the program and run it. The flashing process has started and it's looking good. Hard SPL should now be able to do its job and replace
the boot loader in the phone. And afterwards the phone is still starting. Which is a good sign. Now when I start the phone by holding volume down and power, we can see the bootloadader has indeed changed to the modified bootloader version. OK, it's now time to start flashing some ROMs into this phone. Unfortunately it's been well over 15 years and many of the ROMs have gone missing. In fact many of the original hosting sites are also now completely gone.
Searching through the post archives, I was able to find some X1 ROMs. I couldn't find any official Windows Mobile 6.5 versions for this phone. Some articles mentioned this was cancelled at the last minute. But my example has 6.5 installed on a late boot loader and the bootloader was still locked,
so there must have been some original versions. But I'm OK with trying out Windows Mobile 6.1, because that will give me the original experience with this phone. Flashing takes a few minutes or so. It's always good to plug a charger in during this process. Eventually it says success! And now restarting the phone, and there we go. This is Windows Mobile 6.1. And it has a very Windows style menu interface which is not particularly well
suited for phones. Sony Ericsson did customize the interface a bit to try and make it a bit friendlier and a bit more accessible. By including a feature called panels. Which gives the option of different home screens with different functions. They even put a button on the front of the phone for accessing these panels. This is really the only part of the phone that Sony Ericsson themselves developed. Otherwise this is very much an HTC device running Windows Mobile.
I do like what Sony Ericsson have done to dress up the operating system. But with Windows 6.1, it does kind of feel like putting lipstick on a pig. This was a weird time for smartphones. The iPhone had come out but didn't yet have an app store, and so couldn't be expanded upon its basic functions of inbuilt apps. With Android not yet having been released, there was very little competition for mobile operating systems. I think Microsoft were not feeling much pressure to innovate, and I think it shows with Windows Mobile 6.1. But I do want to try some games on here and see what they're like. I had some trouble finding games that would run properly. And many that I was able to get running
were simply not scaling to adapt to the screen resolution. For example Asphalt 4 looks tiny on this screen. It's been developed to run only on older devices, with screen resolutions of 240 by 320 pixels. But it does also demonstrate just how high resolution this beautiful LCD panel actually is. Eventually I found some games that are able to work better on this display. For example Dragon
Bird is running almost full screen. And this looks like a pretty good game. With just a few graphical glitches from not understanding how tall this display is. But I did find some other games that are definitely taking advantage of the full screen resolution, such as Assassin's Creed. This is a nice little platform puzzle game. The 3D graphics are good but the frame rate is perhaps just a
little bit jerky. It gives us a good example of what 3D graphics look like on this phone. Another game I tried is Zenonia. This is an awesome looking role- playing game in the style of Zelda. It's bright and colorful and detailed. I expect it's probably got some quite deep gameplay. But I didn't end up playing it for too long. From what I've seen the gameplay is good and I do like it so far. I also found an emulated version of an LCD game called Egg which is itself a copy of the original Nintendo Game and Watch version.
Another game I found is Experiment 13. This is a Sony Ericsson published game. It's a really interesting 2D puzzle platformer. With a really cool world rotating mechanic and it's got a very smooth frame rate as it moves its graphics around. As I would expect from a Sony Ericsson developed game running on a Sony Ericsson phone. I think this game was made for the follow-up model to this phone, the Xperia X2. The X2 came with Windows Mobile 6.5. Which I've heard did have a number of glitches and problems on that phone. But it wasn't until the third Xperia the X10, that Sony Ericsson
finally switched to Android. But the X1, with its beautiful flagship design and the possibility of an unlocked bootloadader, wasn't yet ready to give up. Modders began porting Android ROMs to the X1. And today I want to have a look and see how far they got. There's a whole dedicated section on the XDA forums with lots of ROMs being cooked for the X1. It looks like several of them are still available today. And I've chosen one to try out. Installing them can be quite tricky though as I soon found out. It's not just a case of putting the ROM onto an SD card and flashing the phone.
I had to read through quite a few tutorials to get the right procedure. First it's necessary to do a task 29 to wipe Windows Mobile off the phone which can interfere with an Android install. Fortunately this can be done easily using a hacked version of the ROM Update Utility. After doing this the
phone should still turn on, but only up to the Sony Ericsson logo and no further. Now it's time to flash an Android bootloader into the phone. The Android bootloader is installed as a secondary bootloader. And doesn't interfere with the original Hard SPL modded bootloader. This is
good news because it means the chance of bricking is low. With the right files on the Micro SD, booting the phone now starts it up in FastBoot mode over USB. Next run a batch file on the computer. And this runs the necessary ADB commands to install an Android recovery partition into the phone. Now I just need to restart the phone while holding the camera button, And there we go! The
phone is now running Clockwork Mod Recovery. This is really starting to turn into an Android phone right before my eyes. I just need to wipe some cases in the phone including Davlik. I put a full Android ROM onto the Micro SD card and I can now use the recovery menu to install. Android In this case. I'm installing Cyanogen Mod 7. Everything looks like it's going nice and smooth now. It's looking good and restarting the phone, And there goes, all the startup text
scrolling by. It's taking quite a while to start up, but there's the Cyanogen Mod logo. OK, there we go. This is a community developed version of Android, and not everything is quite finished. Some of the functions like parts of the GPS or the camera autofocus are not fully supported. But almost everything else seems to work as a phone. Apparently the Wi-Fi support
still has a few glitches. But I'm able to get it working without a hitch. This is a really nice effort and well done to the developers. It's been a long time since I've seen this version of Android. I'm sure some people did run this as their main operating system on this phone. If that's you let me know in the comments below. I had a
look through many of the in-built apps and the settings and it's looking quite good, and I'm liking what I see. I was able to locally install a few additional apps, including Angry Birds. The game runs and it plays OK, though it's not the smoothest experience. One of the problems with this port of Android must be that the graphics hardware acceleration is not properly supported. I also tried installing some Android demoscene demos. And yeah, there's definitely no graphics acceleration going on. There's quite a number of these early Android demoscene demos that I want to try out, but this isn't the phone to do that on.
I went in search of some custom Windows Mobile ROMs to try This one here is called Touch X version 10.10 OMG Full. This ROM does completely away with the Sony Ericsson panels launcher, and instead replaces it with HTC's own launcher. It's based on Windows Mobile 6.1 and it really gives your X1 that HTC feel. But I'm keen to also try out Windows Mobile 6.5. And I did find this Vision Edition custom ROM. It's got the full icon view that Microsoft added to
jazz up their operating system. And it does include the Sony Ericsson panels function. Though there's only two options. But one of them is called Tile Wave. With this cool 3D tile effect. I really like this. This is very cool I wonder if this is from the Xperia X2.
OK, I have one more operating system that I want to try and that's Linux or Ubuntu to be exact. Fortunately to run this I don't need to install this onto the internal memory. It runs directly from a Micro SD card. It runs by first booting the phone into Windows Mobile and then running a loader program on the phone. Linux is not running on top of Windows Mobile. It takes
over the whole system. It kills Windows Mobile and boots Linux instead. It takes several minutes to run through the startup, But leave it scrolling away and eventually you get to the graphical user interface. And yep, there we go. We're now running Linux on the X1 with a very desktop style graphical user interface. Everything is tiny on this little screen. I really like seeing this run on here. But there doesn't seem to be much I can really do with this. I also find the touch screen is fairly hard to navigate as a mouse. But I'm able to get several programs running and the multitasking looks good. I like the way this makes it look like
a tiny little computer. OK, back in Windows and I tried some Windows mobile scene demos. I was able to get several running. But they all seem to run at a screen resolution of 480 x 640 pixels, and leaving an unused section of the display. It's good but a
little bit frustrating that they're not drawing on that section of the display. Apart from the curve on the slide out display, one of the more innovative aspects of this phone is not actually inside the phone itself. In the months between the announcement of this phone and its final release, Sony Ericsson developed a web series called 'Where is Johnny X?', to help promote this phone "I'm your wife" "Yes, You've got nothing to do with this." "Man, Leave him alone" It consisted of nine episodes about 2 minutes each. That were released during the promotional phase. This also helped to promote the Xperia brand itself. Can't think of any other phone that used this sort of technique to promote itself "This is not a hoax" Overall this phone is a really nice design. But with some definite flaws. I'd say it's
mostly let down by its choice of operating system. And I can understand why some people were so motivated to upgrade the operating system in their phone. I'm happy to have this phone in my collection, and I'll definitely be putting this on my shelf of interesting phones. This was the very first Sony Ericsson Xperia. A strange start to one of the more innovative lines of phones that's still going strong today. In the future I'll
be exploring more Sony Ericsson and also more of the interesting Xperias that have come out. That's it for the moment. Thanks for joining me tonight, and I hope you have a great evening.
2025-04-15 07:39
