The nominees for the Sony Ericsson Content Awards 2008 have been published on their website, but there’s still one category that’s accepting submissions and that’s the Xperia Panels category. The competition is open for any developer including individuals as well as companies. Panels can be created with the Sony Ericsson Beta SDK, which can be downloaded here.

The competition is open until the 30th of January 2009, so get your submissions in by then. The winners will be announced a few days later on the 5th of February.

Good news for all Facebook panel users out there, it’s been reported that the panel has been updated. While the update doesn’t bring any added features, users are reporting it is much faster when loading and provides better performance.

The Facebook panel for your Xperia X1, can either be downloaded directly from the Sony Ericsson website or via your handset. Going to the More Panels option on your handset will allow you to download the update.

Thanks to MySonyEricsson, you can now create your own panels for your Xperia X1. They have released an unofficial web application that allows you to create your own panels from HTML code.

All that you need to do to create your own panel, is to code a HTML file and have some thumbnail screenshots. The files are then uploaded to the web application which creates the panel from it for you to download. For the time being, only panels supported by Pocket IE 5 will work.

You can find the web application here and the guide to using it here.

Via: WMExperts

If you haven’t tried the Facebook Panel for the Xperia X1 yet, PhonesReview have posted up a video demonstration of the Facebook Panel.

The video starts right at the beginning with selecting the panel and launching it. The Facebook panel will log you in automatically to your account from there the “bubble bump” screen will appear. The bubble bump display shows yourself and your friends in bubbles, which can be selected. If you select a friend, the panel allows you to send them a message. You can also keep track of who’s updated their profiles lately with the color coded bubbles. A green bubble means that your friend has been active, while a white bubble means they haven’t got any updates.

The video also shows the panel in both portrait mode and landscape mode. You can view the video after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Following on from their Hardware overview of the Xperia X1, Pocket Now have posted up the next two parts to the video, focusing on the Panel interface and the software of the X1.

In the panels video, Pocket Now highlight the benefits of the Panels, as opposed to the standard Windows Mobile Today Screen.
Read the rest of this entry »

Remember the TouchFlo3D on the Xperia X1? harvsignh over at the XDA-Developers forums has ported the panels found on the Xperia X1 to his HTC Touch HD.

This is in it’s first stages at the moment so it’s only partially working and is still being tested. The CAB files haven’t been publicly released but a few other users at XDA-Developers may be using and testing the software out.

A few errors have been found already, such as the Panels no longer working after the phone has been reset. The problems do seem to be being worked on though so we may see the CAB file soon. harvsingh has also provided a video of the Panels in action on the Touch HD, which you can view here.

Via: WM Power User and XDA-Developers

The panel interface is one of the highlighted features of the new Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 and as we previously reported, Sony released the SDK for the panels which allows developers to rush in and create a host of optional panels to fill one of the nine panel slots on the cell phone.

Read the rest of this entry »

WMPowerUser explains one of the reasons why he thought that the Xperia X1 was unpolished and how to fix it.

Many of the panels default back to Pocket IE, with Opera Mobile 9.5 being added at the last minute. The shipping hardware hasn’t fixed this problem, but it is possible to fix it yourself easily.

If you know how to edit xml files you can edit the xml file in \Program\Panels\GooglePanel. All that needs changing is to replace iexplorer.exe with operaL.exe each time it’s mentioned in the file. If you’d rather not edit the file yourself, P@itor, a member of xda-developers has provided the edited xml file. You can download it here and replace the xml file found in the GooglePanel directory.

If the pdf user manual wasn’t enough for you, Sony Ericsson have an Xperia X1 simulator page. While you can’t actually demo the phone through the simulator, it is possible to select actions.

Each action selected will guide you through the steps on how you would complete the task on the phone itself, with bundles of information about the X1 and a ’simulation’ of the phone being used.

You can also grab some downloadable content from the Sony Ericsson website for the X1. Content ranges from themes, images and panels.
Read the rest of this entry »