Sony-Ericsson has always walked it’s own path. And it hasn’t always been highlighted with the best of tactical choices. Symbian. Windows Mobile. But they’ve always made great phones, and since the Sony tie-up, when discussing camera-phones, there has just been no way to ignore them. So, what about this new device, the Xperia X10? Well, at home, in Japan, NTT DoCoMo sold 100,000 X10 handsets in the first 20 days, making the Xperia the best-selling smartphone in that market’s history. Even discounting the bias toward feature-phones in Asia, that’s a noteworthy achievement.

It’s a very elegant phone, despite it’s size, which is due in part to that lovely big display, all 4 inches, 480×854 pixels and 65K colours of it. The other numbers look like this: 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, 8GB MicroSD memory, 1GB on-board, topped off with Google’s Android 1.6 operating system. The Cybershot 8MP camera, of course, does not disappoint. 3264×2448 pixels, autofocus, LED flash touch focus, image stabilization, geo-tagging, face and smile detection…

It would be hugely over-dramatic to say that the future of the company depends on this phone. But it is very important that Sony-Ericsson has a viable player in the hugely competitive smartphone-space, that is currently being dominated by the iPhone, Android variants from HTC and others, and under threat from the arrival of Windows Phone 7. Can the X10 be that viable player? We’ll see.