Sony Ericsson shows off face recognition on the Xperia X10

If you were wondering how face recognition worked on the Xperia X10, you will be interested to know that Sony Ericsson has put together a quick tutorial that should help to clear up any confusion.

Many of us are familiar with facial recognition on the software level -- for example, the Picasa desktop software can automatically detect people you've tagged in other photos -- but few cell phones include this feature. If you tend to keep a lot of photos on your cell, it's easy to see how having built-in face recognition could be useful.

What this does in X10 is quite cool. Every contact in the contact view gets his/her own tab with pics of that person. And the other way around, albums for all your friends are automatically created among your albums in Mediascape. Both these can also be reached from clicking the infinte-button at various places such as on a contact-related event in Timescape or a photo in Mediascape. This really connects the Mediascape and Timescape applications and ties things together in a very nice way.

Sony Ericsson has a reputation for camera quality, and the 8.1 megapixel version packed into the X10 should be no exception. Face recognition is only useful if it's accurate, and it looks like the Xperia X10 can deliver.