The Sony Xperia X8 was first announced in June 2010 and released in September the same year.

It was quite a low-end device, even for its time.

It has a 3” display with a resolution of 320x480, 6 physical buttons (plus the power button), a 600Mhz Snapdragon S1 processor, a speaker, a micro-sd slot and a SIM card slot.

Firmware

The device came with Android 1.6 but was later upgraded by Sony to Android 2.1. Sony said they could not upgrade it to Android 2.3 because the user experience was not satisfactory.

However, custom ROMs are available for this device, all the way up to Android 4.4 Kitkat. But before you can flash a custom rom on this thing, you need to unlock the bootloader.

This took me a while but i eventually was able to unlock it through Sony’s website. After i flashed my first kernel with Flashtool, i flashed my first custom ROM.

My first custom ROM was based on ICS but i later found a port by yairpatch.

Download CM 10.2 (Android 4.3) for the Xperia X8

After some tweaking, i got Android 4.3 to run smoothly on the device.

With the exception of Bluetooth not working well, everything else (Wifi, phone, 3D) works just fine.

Games

Now that my device is set up, i decided to play some games to see how well it performs. Most of them just flat out crash tho.

At first, i didn’t know why but i later found out it was due to developers building against a recent SDK which compiles code that work only on armeabi-v7, despite claiming the contrary…

So most of the games that require Android 4.0 or superior will most likely not work.

Here are some of the games that do work :

All of my Android games, including Rubby Bird, work fine on this device.

So when a game DO work, most of the time, it works fairly smoothly. … Even on Android 4.3.

Things that don’t work include Swing Copters 2, PPSSPP, Sonic Dash 2 and more…

Multimedia

Video/Sound support on this thing is what you would expect to be : OK.

It plays most of the common formats but it won’t do any miracles.

480p videos work on this device but i could not get 720p videos to work on this thing.

Do not think you can install a third-party app like VLC or MX Player to fix that

because they don’t work on Armv6 devices like the Xperia X8…

Anything higher than 480p is a waste of space/resources on the X8 anyways…

Apps

Some modern apps still work on this but most of them, like Firefox, will just flat-out crash on it.

Why ?

Because the X8 uses an Armv6 processor, which are no longer supported and anything built against Lollipop will crash on such a device.

I managed to make File Manager Pro and mLauncher to work on this so all is not lost but Firefox for example, does not work on it…

I think the last version to work on it is version 33.0. I’m not even sure you can use Facebook Lite or Twitter on it…

Conclusion

So there you go.

Is this good enough for basic tasks ? Yes. Is it cool to play with ? Perhaps. Can you live with this thing for 5 years and expect to use facebook, twitter… on it ?

No.