Sony Ericsson Idou Up Close With XPERIA X1, Nokia E71

After yesterday's in-the-wild sighting, it's time for some more live shots of Sony Ericsson's Idou smartphone.  This time courtesy of fony.sk, it's a chance to see how the Idou holds up compared to the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 and Nokia E71.  It's hard to tell what stage the Idou's Symbian Foundation OS is at compared to yesterday's version, but the menus do look more complete.

There's also plenty of attention paid to the camera and the subsequent image editing functionality.  Sony Ericsson have promised comprehensive on-device tweaking, and going from the screenshots there do seem to be more options than the typical rotate/zoom you'd get on most handsets.

When you hold it up next to two hardware-QWERTY devices, then flick over to shots of the Idou's on-screen keyboard, it does make you wonder whether the scaling is quite right.  In the SMS composition app, the text box itself is shrunk down to less than a third of the display so as to fit all the keys in.  That's not so bad when you're pecking out a 160 character text message, but it could be more frustrating filling in web-forms.

Still, with a tentative release date of "the Summer" there's plenty of time for all aspects of the Idou to be fettled.  Of course, that's assuming a potential split of the two companies would leave the Idou even on the roadmap.