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One of the trends these days, especially in the hypercompetitive market of the UK, one of the markets most interested in social networking, is for handset vendors to build social networks into their phones. So it comes as little surprise that Sony Ericsson has launched new panels for its Xperia X1 multimedia phone featuring Facebook, Windows Live and Dashwire.

The biggest problem with the X1 is that it all too clearly runs Windows Mobile, an operating system which is falling in popularity with the advent of touchscreen smartphones and the growth of simpler user interfaces. But the X1 has a single button that drops the Windows façade and offers up to nine functional panels, all of which are configurable. The only panel so far that looks nothing like Windows is the media panel, while many others are for Windows Live services such as Hotmail, and require use of a stylus.

Far more interesting is the new Facebook panel, offering a new mobile version of the social networking site that shows the latest status of friends as the user touches their images onscreen. It also offers fast upload of photos to Facebook, access to friends' lists and phone numbers, and click-to-call capabilities.

These two web-centric panels come in addition to the existing connectivity panel from Dashwire, a site that allows phone content to be synced to the web, and data shared among a range of social networking sites, notably Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed, and Bebo.

The new panels can be downloaded from the Sony Ericsson web site using the phone. The more panels of this type it comes up with, the better it will disguise its Windows heritage, and the more successful this phone will be. The vendor recently released a beta software developers kit for Windows Mobile 6.1 based on Visual Studio to encourage developers to design new Xperia panels and has begun a competition for panel creation which will end in January.

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