The Aspen may well be the phone you’re least likely to expect from Sony Ericsson. To begin with, it’s a PocketPC but shuns comparison to the XPERIA line. On a second thought though – it’s a concept that can be traced way back in the Sony Ericsson portfolio. The mythical P series were at one point the place to look for the ultimate smartphone. Symbian UIQ even extended to include the G series and the M series. Those of you paying attention might as well remember a couple of touchscreen Walkman phones too.
But this is no time for a crash course in Sony Ericsson history. The Aspen is about to hit the shelves and we guess you are busy doing your homework.
Touchscreen, D-pad and a full QWERTY keyboard – the Sony Ericsson Aspen is a gadget designed to put you in control. But where some will see endless possibilities of interacting with the device, others will be right to question the usability of the whole thing. Too many buttons leave little room for the display – a small and low-res touchscreen is one compromise Aspen’s users will have to be prepared to consider.
On the other hand though, the Sony Ericsson Aspen runs the latest WinMo Pro version and has a fair degree of UI customization to try and offer the best user experience. The phone brings a complete set of business features and even attempts to deliver above-average media. Not least, the GreenHeart logo will perhaps serve as extra motivation for users to give the Aspen a try.
Key features
* Four-row QWERTY keyboard, D-pad navigation
* 2.4" 65K-color resistive touchscreen of 320 x 240 pixel resolution
* Windows Mobile 6.5.3 Professional with XPERIA panels
* 256MB RAM, 265MB ROM, 100MB user storage
* Quad-band GSM support and 3G with HSDPA 7.2Mbps and HSUPA 2Mbps support
* Wi-Fi b/g
* GPS with A-GPS support
* DivX, XviD video support
* microSD card slot (up to 16GB, 8GB card in the box)
* 3.15 megapixel fixed-focus camera, geotagging, VGA video recording @ 15fps
* Office document viewer
* Web browser has Flash support
* Stereo FM Radio with RDS; TrackID
* microUSB and stereo Bluetooth v2.0
* 3.5mm audio jack
* Made of recycled materials, comes with waterborne paint
Main disadvantages
* Small and low-res touchscreen display
* Fairly customized but inconsistent UI
* No proximity sensor for in-call screen auto locking
* No secondary video-call camera
* Memory card slot under the battery cover
* Poor still imaging and video, no flash
* Video playing limited to QVGA
* Poor task switching
The Aspen may not be most people’s first choice of a PocketPC but it fits the bill for business. Not least because of its fairly compact size and messenger form factor. It enters a market dominated by Nokia’s Eseries and BlackBerry but seems to have enough character to set itself apart.
It also looks likely to be cheaper than the average BlackBerry and Nokia enterprise handsets. It adds touchscreen to a standard QWERTY keyboard. While this isn’t that much of an advantage in this form factor, users are at least given an extra degree of functionality. The eco-friendly vibe and the human curvature styling are some extra points in its favor.
Among other things, the Aspen is perhaps helping Sony Ericsson stay focused while waiting for WinMo 7. It also does well to bring an extra dimension to their GreenHeart lineup. So, it may repay in more ways than one but – as usual – the question we’re asking is what it offers users. Follow us on the next page as we start exploring the Sony Ericsson Aspen. The first thing on our checklist is exterior and handling.
Sony Ericsson Aspen 360-degree spin
At 117 x 60 x 12.5 mm, the Sony Ericsson Aspen is well within limits for a QWERTY messenger candybar. It fails to match the strong presence of the Nokia E71 but affordability is not the only explanation for the plasticky finish. The Aspen is a GreenHeart phone and it means it.The touchscreen obviously suffers the form factor limitations – it’s too small and low-res. On the other hand, the D-pad is very comfortable and covers almost all of the touch navigation. We’ve come to judge touchscreen user-friendliness by whether or not it rules out stylus use. Ironically, the Aspen does better than most phones with a resistive screen. A D-pad and a couple of hardware buttons are obviously not the right reasons but still.
Design and construction
The Sony Ericsson Aspen is a scaled up Elm and the plastic outfit is quite alright. Recycled materials and shipping-optimization are what GreenHeart is all about. And come to think of it, affordability is a welcome side effect.
The human curvature design is a lot less prominent than on the Sony Ericsson Elm and Hazel. We found it to give the other phones in the lineup a very secure and comfortable grip. But it would’ve been a hurdle in the Aspen, which is meant for two-handed use. The weight balance is still perfect though: the keypad sticks to your thumb.
Sony Ericsson Aspen uses a 2.4" 65K-color TFT resistive display of QVGA resolution. Now, this size hardly implies thumb-friendliness but that’s not our main gripe with the screen. The excellent D-pad more than makes up for it. We know it’s arguable whether this phone needs a touchscreen in the first place. The poor sunlight legibility and contrast is the first thing to worry about here, but that’s common for this type of displays.
The earpiece is placed dead center at the top of the front panel. A little to the right is a status LED. What we do miss is a proximity sensor to lock the screen during calls.
Below the display is the main bank of control and navigation keys and the QWERTY keyboard. The D-pad is excellent to work with and you can use it throughout the interface to select/confirm. The Call/End knobs, the XPERIA panel button and OK key are all large and comfortable, with very solid press.
The QWERTY keyboard uses a four-row layout and there is no dedicated numeric row – which we don’t mind. The numpad is centrally placed, numbers sharing keys with some of the letters.
Actually Aspen’s keyboard is almost the same as that of Nokia E63/E71, in both layout and design. The keys are tiny (save for the massive space bar), but thanks to their convex shape are easy to hit.
The right side of the handset hosts the volume rocker, which doubles as a zoom lever. There is no dedicated camera key but the D-pad serves a triple purpose. The confirm key snaps the photo, left/right sets exposure compensation and up/down switches between the still camera and the camcorder.At the top are the Power/Lock key and the 3.5 mm audio jack. In the top right corner you will find the stylus compartment.The rear side of the handset features the 3.2 megapixel camera lens and the loudspeaker. The battery cover is partly made of aluminum and has the Sony Ericsson logo. There is no protection for the camera lens, except that it’s slightly sunk. No need to fuss anyway over a 3 MP fixed focus snapper.Removing the battery cover unveils the standard Sony Ericsson BST-41 Li-Po battery with a capacity of 1500 mAh. We can’t be too specific but it looks like you can count on above-average battery performance given the small and low-res screen on the Aspen.
Also under the battery cover is the hot-swappable microSD memory card slot.
We have no reason to question the build quality of the Sony Ericsson Aspen. It is not the kind of handset to turn heads but has enough character and seems quite durable too. The Aspen handles nicely – depending on how you feel about the whole touchscreen / QWERTY combo. We guess some people will be glad to have both touch and D-pad navigation. Others will just see no point in such a small and low-res touchscreen.User interface – many faces to choose from
Windows Mobile and touchscreen go a long way back but … well …the UI just hasn’t come close enough to the desired performance. Windows Mobile 6.5.3 that powers the Sony Ericsson Aspen is a noted improvement over 6.1 but manufacturers have long given up waiting on Microsoft and come up with fixes of their own.The idea behind panels is simple and efficient. They are homescreens with diverse functionality. Some are fun but mostly useless, others are very advanced – they support widgets and so on. There’re some that handle a single but important function, like Skype or Facebook.
The Sony Ericsson Aspen comes with six panels preinstalled – the Sony Ericsson panel, two SPB Mobile Shell panels, a Skype panel, a Facebook panel, the Support panel and of course Today, which is the vanilla Windows Mobile interface.
The customizations run a little deeper – there’s also the shortcuts menu from Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2, which in the Aspen is called Slide View.Unlike panels, Slide View is iffy when it comes to what it’s for. You have a scrollable list of items: Messages, Calendar, Media and so on. When you select an item it offers a bit more information, e.g. “2 unread messages”. All of these are side scrollable too – and if you do you’ll get access to various options.
Sound familiar? It should – this is pretty much what the Windows Mobile 6.5 homescreen does.Sure, Slide View is basic but it brings a custom (and better) gallery, video player and so on, and it’s all in one easily accessible place. But it just doesn’t do much more than the standard WinMo 6.5 homescreen.
Anyway, we’ll cover the various Slide View sections later on in this review -- we’ll stick with the panels for now.
First off, the Sony Ericsson panel is quite simple – it offers one row for a clock and six buttons. The row shows a digital clock with date and serves as a shortcut to the Alarms app. The buttons are shortcuts but they also display info.Let’s look closely at the buttons: the first deals with the weather forecast, the second switches profiles, the third one launches the browser and the other three handle email, missed calls and messages respectively.
There are two SPB Mobile Shell panels – Lifestyle and Professional. Functionally they are the same, but the good thing is that they remember what widgets you’ve put on them. This lets you put work widgets on one and personal widgets on the other. There’s another feature that makes this even better – but more on that later.SPB Mobile Shell is quite complete – it’s a homescreen, a phonebook and launcher. On the homescreen you have several sections and you can swipe left and right to get to them. That gives you plenty of room for widgets. Better still – most widgets have a size setting, so you can make important widgets big and less commonly used ones smaller.The phonebook is customized too – favorite contacts are represented by shortcuts (you can change their size and freely rearrange them). The All Contacts list is more traditional, but features an on-screen alphanumeric keypad that just wastes space. It has filtering enabled to easily find just the ones you need in a long list.You can link contacts to their Facebook accounts (SPB Mobile Shell tries to do that automatically, but if the user names differ, you’ll have to help it out). This is the quickest way to assign contact shortcuts.
The launcher is an alternate way to organize your apps. There are a couple of eye-candy ways to view contacts and messages – but those are hard to get to and most people won’t ever use them.The Facebook and Skype panels offer constant, quick access to your social networking or IM clients. We’ll cover those two panels in more detail later. For now, we’ll just say that their major weakness is that they are not apps.Let us clarify – there are no Skype or Facebook apps on the Aspen, just the panels. But each time you tap Facebook (or Skype) from the menu, your current panel gets replaced by the Facebook (or Skype) panel. You can’t, for example, run Skype in the background and use SPB Mobile Shell at the same time.
We mentioned that having two almost identical versions of SPB Mobile Shell is a good thing – here’s why.
You can set the Sony Ericsson Aspen to switch panels automatically for different times of the day with the easy to use timeline tool. So making it use SPB Mobile Shell Professional during work hours, then switch to Lifestyle after work and then, say, to the Facebook panel in the evening automatically is a breeze.Sony Ericsson have thrown in one more extra feature to remedy the shortcomings of the OS – a task manager. Holding down the Windows key brings up the task manager, which can be used to switch between or terminate apps.It has one (but major) shortcoming – it works only on the homescreen.
To conclude, the Sony Ericsson Aspen is sincerely trying to address some of the design and usability shortcomings of Windows Mobile. The XPERIA panels and Slide View do make the interface more thumbable and user-friendly. But then, we guess many will be missing the point of having both a touchscreen and a D-pad.
Indeed, you can control the Aspen almost without ever touching the display. Some users will cheer the opportunity to experience the best of both worlds. Others will be less than impressed – and we can’t blame them.A really good phonebook
The phonebook, favorite contacts and the call log on the Sony Ericsson Aspen share one window in a tabbed interface – just like they did on the XPERIA X2. All of them are touch optimized and use big enough fonts.
The phonebook supports Smart dialing. Start typing on the screen, the phonebook automatically launches and searches the contacts list accordingly.Contact info is displayed in a very simple and easy to read manner. You have the contact picture at the top and all the contact details underneath, everything stylishly dressed in black with white fonts and nice icons. It did work better on the vertical screen of the XPERIA X2, the landscape screen of the Aspen fits just a few rows.
Unfortunately, editing or adding a contact throws you back into the old WinMo skin. At least you still have a plethora of available info fields - and if by any rare chance those are not enough, you can always rename some of the existing fields and use them instead.
One interesting bit that the Sony Ericsson Contacts app has over the stock WinMo one is the option to call a contact or send them an SMS message via Skype. This would really come in handy when travelling abroad – all you need to avoid roaming charges is some Skype Out credit and a wireless hotspot.
The SPB Mobile shell panel has an alternative Contacts app. If lets you add favorite contacts as shortcuts of various sizes, link contacts to their Facebook account and snatch contact photos from there.Telephony is great
The Sony Ericsson Aspen does very well at its main job – making calls. In-call sound is loud and the reception is quite strong, even though the network indicator tends to show less bars than it should.
As we already mentioned, the Aspen supports Smart dialing. It’s active straight on the homescreen so you won’t be using the Phonebook very often.
The call log is pretty standard, just like every other Sony Ericsson. If you select an event you will be redirected to a more informative window with call duration and options for call and text.
There’s no proximity sensor to lock the display during a call – but since the display is not a capacitive unit, the accidental presses are rare.We also ran our traditional speakerphone test to round off the phone part of the Aspen review and it scored a Good mark.Messaging has pretty skins, all WinMo underneath
There are a handful of ways to get to your inbox (SMS or email). Perhaps the most convenient is the email and SMS shortcuts on the screen which show the number of unread messages.
Another way is the Slide View menu, which is the same as the XPERIA Shortcuts menu on the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2. From there you can run the SMS/MMS or Email applications. Unfortunately this is where the custom UI ends and the stock Windows Mobile begins.The Sony Ericsson Aspen supports SMS, MMS and email. SMS and MMS share an inbox and a message editor. Threaded SMS is also available of course.There are two special types of MMS – the Voice MMS, which is a handy way to record a memo and sent it to someone, and Location message, which sends an SMS with a link to Sony Ericsson’s site. The page shows a map with your current location.
Setting up your email is easy as it gets. You type your username and password and all the other fiddly options are configured automatically.The Sony Ericsson Aspen offers a few features to save you from embarrassing mistakes. Check Names looks at the To field to make sure the recipient’s name and number or email address are typed correctly.
The other feature is Spell Check – which does just what it says. Funny though, it didn’t have either Ericsson or Aspen in its dictionary, which makes for two spell errors in the default “Sent from my Sony Ericsson Aspen” signature. You can easily add new words to the dictionary, so the problem is quickly resolved.
There are more spell checking options – you can activate spell correction as you type, which offers advanced features like Next word prediction auto-append and auto-substitution. Auto-substitution for example offers a list of substitutions – you can for example set “brb” to display as “be right back” and keep “SMS-speak” speed without sounding like a 13-year old.
There’s one more way to view messages that we’d like to mention. The 3D Message Viewer form the Messaging section in the Launcher shows a 3D stack of messages (it works for either SMS or email) that is good eye candy and reminiscent of the Sense UI way of displaying messages.
Image gallery looks cool, but runs slow
You can use the default Windows Mobile image gallery if you really wanted to, but you’d be better off pretending that the Sony Ericsson one is the only one available. It is available from the Slide View menu.You use sweeps to navigate around the images. If you tap on screen you also get zooming and slideshow controls. You can only zoom using the virtual zoom keys – double-tapping and other zooming methods are not supported. The gallery is not very fast, but it’s fairly responsive.A basic music player
You can find the embedded music player into the media menu and it's very similar to the Walkman player in the Sony Ericsson's feature phones and can handle playlists, filter your tracks by albums, authors, etc. Album art is supported, but unfortunately there are no equalizer presets, stereo enhancements or visualizations.Its design matches the whole Slide View menu and looks good, but this beauty doesn't completely disguise the rather basic functionality. While there’s a song playing, a small note icon appears at the bottom of the screen – tapping it pulls out a panel with the music player controls.
While this is good, it’s only visible in the Slide View menu – so, you can’t control the music player from the homescreen or other menus.The sound coming out of the loudspeaker on the Sony Ericsson Aspen is pretty loud and doesn’t get muffled even on even surfaces.
FM radio works just fine
The Sony Ericsson Aspen comes with an FM radio receiver and a relevant app. The UI is simple and easy to work with and it has a slide-out panel like the music player.The TrackID app will help you find info about the song they’re playing at the cafe', for example. It just needs to sample a few seconds of the song and consult with the TrackID servers.Video player supports DivX/XviD, low-res videos only
The Video section of the Slide View menu offers good support for video codecs – it played our test DivX/XviD and MP4 videos. However, the hardware wasn’t quite up to the task – anything over QVGA resolution suffered dropped frames.Not that there’s a point to play videos with larger than QVGA resolution on a 2.4” QVGA screen, but it still means you have to re-encode your videos to watch on the Sony Ericsson Aspen. Sony Ericsson Media Go will probably help in this respect.
Audio quality is decent, but the volume is low
The area where we didn't really expect the Aspen to impress was audio quality. However the smartphone surprised us by providing nice clean output, which considering that it hasn't hit the shelves yet might improve even further.
Of course it's not all roses as the Aspen is the quietest handset we have seen so far and the extreme bass frequencies have been cut-off but that's about all the things that are wrong with it. The rest of the scores are decent and should suffice to satisfy the eventual customers' needs. Frankly, we just can't see many audiophiles going for the WM-powered device. Disappointing 3MP snapper
The Sony Ericsson Aspen is no cameraphone – it has a 3MP fixed-focus camera with maximum image resolution of 2048x1536 pixels. The controls are very simplified, providing the essential functionality only.
There’s no shutter key – instead you start the camera by holding down the OK key. The D-pad serves a triple purpose – the confirm key snaps the photo, left/right adjusts the exposure compensation and up/down switches between the still and video cameras. There’s digital zoom controlled by the volume rocker, but face it – digital zoom is bad for your photos.
As far as the options go, aside from exposure compensation, you can also enable Twilight mode (smart contrast) for low-light situations and the most advanced function of the camera – geotagging.The image quality is quite poor – the major problem of the Sony Ericsson Aspen camera is the severe rolling shutter. We tried hard to hold the phone steadily, but even then you can spot the jello effect in most camera samples.
There’s also heavy fringing, poor contrast, the colors are a bit off and the high amount of noise (monochromatic noise, but still) coupled with aggressive noise-reduction means that the photos from the Aspen are not particularly good by any measure. You should have in mind though, that things might improve a bit before the device hits the market.Synthetic resolution
We also snapped our resolution chart with the Sony Ericsson Aspen.
Video recording isn’t any better
The Sony Ericsson Aspen can capture videos with VGA resolution at 15fps. That’s far from impressive. The videos are riddled with compression artifacts and the rolling shutter problem makes itself abundantly clear here again.Good connectivity
Connectivity is one of the better aspects of the Sony Ericsson Aspen. It offers worldwide roaming quad-band GSM and two versions for the 3G – dual-band or triple-band depending on where you buy your Aspen. The 3G is HSPA enabled, so you can count on high download and upload speeds.A 3.5mm audio jack and a microUSB port score points for standards and there’s of course Bluetooth support. The high-end feature on the Aspen is the Wi-Fi support – heavier downloads are not a problem when you don’t have to worry about reception and data charges.
USB 2.0 connections are supported as well, through a microUSB port. When connected to a computer, the Sony Ericsson Aspen prompts you to select among ActiveSync, Mass Storage or Modem mode.
Internet Explorer Mobile has full Flash support
As you may have expected, the web browser is Internet Explorer 6 Mobile, which is the latest, most touch optimized version of IE Mobile available. It has even adopted some of the treats of Opera Mobile, including kinetic scrolling and Flash support.Zooming in is best done with a double tap on the text. Your other option is to hit the menu and use the zoom slider. There are five available font sizes and you can choose how the browser renders pages – as a handheld or as a desktop browser.
Since the Sony Ericsson Aspen’s screen is already oriented in landscape, there’s no option to rotate the screen. That’s not the browser’s biggest problem though.
With 2.4 inches of QVGA screen, Internet Explorer Mobile 6 doesn’t have much to work with but the zoom slider makes an especially bad impression. It overlaps the Go button and the Close button, making them very hard to press.
The low resolution also means that at low zoom levels text is not very smooth. Lack of on-screen text reflow doesn’t help readability much either.
The IE has Flash and Flash video support, thank to Flash Lite 3.1 and runs almost everything which requires Flash – from YouTube videos to games. However, Flash is generally sluggish and memory hungry – Insufficient Memory errors is something you’ll have to get used to, especially if you have a couple of apps running in the background.Flash support aside, Opera Mobile is still the better browser for Windows Mobile. Maybe things will be different on Windows Phone 7, but with WinMo 6, there are no surprises.
One thing that got on our nerves is the spell check – when it’s on, it kept correcting the URLs we were typing, which usually resulted in us entering a wrong URL and getting redirected to a Bing search. Spell checking has no place in an URL bar (or username and password fields, which we experienced on XPERIA X8 recently).Organizer has gotten prettier
Windows Mobile offers several time-management features and their claim to fame is that they are a breeze to synchronize with MS Outlook. It offers daily, weekly and monthly view. You can have the week start on either Monday or Sunday. Weekends can be hidden from the Calendar if you use it for business strictly.The Slide View menu does try to put a skin on top of the calendar – and as with the rest of the interface it succeeds, but only partially. Doing anything other than viewing a contact, drops you down to the age old UI.The To-Do list allows you to add tasks and assign them priority. The Notes also come in handy, as you can either type or directly write the text down on the screen. The Voice recorder and Calculator go without saying.The Alarm clock has three alarm slots. Each Alarm can have its own repeat pattern. Due to the little customization options in the default Alarms application, we suggest you check out some free third-party alternatives.An office in your pocket
Among the other WM core applications is the Office Mobile package featuring support for viewing and editing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. With the latest version of Office Mobile, you also get the OneNote application.Thanks to the Adobe Reader LE, there is also support for viewing PDF documents. The Sony Ericsson Aspen does well at scrolling and panning. However, the small, low-res screen limits its capabilities to mostly reading documents, writing more than a sentence is not an easy task.
A rich application package
The Sony Ericsson Aspen comes with a rich selection of preinstalled apps, in addition to the already wide functionality provided by the panels. If you’re still short, the Windows Marketplace provides a catalogue of various apps.
The Microsoft Marketplace is not preinstalled, but installs the first time you run it. It’s simple to use and should be the first place you check when you need an app, but it’s not as good as the iPhone and Android stores.The interface is pretty straightforward – it gives you shortcuts to the most popular applications, the most recent ones, as well as a category view. There is of course a search box too to make things easier.
For each app in the Marketplace there are user reviews, screenshots and, as usual, individual ratings.
A useful preinstalled app is Universal search. It’s a one-stop shop for your search needs – Google, Wikipedia, Twitter, phone contents, Universal search can look everywhere you need it to.Of course, when it comes to search, you can’t miss the Bing app. It can do a wide variety of online searches (e.g. movies, local gas stations, etc.) but Bing Maps is one of the most interesting features.You can browse maps, same as Google Maps, and you can also plan routes with it. As is, the app doesn’t offer voice prompts, just a list of the turns you have to take and a map overview.
But that’s because it’s an old version – you should try to update to the new one, which does offer free voice guided navigation (USA-only for now). The Aspen is not yet (at the time of writing) included in the supported phones list, but give it a shot again when you get one – if it works, it’ll be worth it.
There’s another SatNav app preinstalled, we’ll cover it in the next chapter.
Anyway, while Internet Explorer 6 has good enough Flash support to play YouTube videos straight from the browser, the dedicated YouTube app offers a much easier to use interface.The Sony Ericsson Aspen also comes with a handy news reader – Express News.If you have to make many expensive international calls, then Skype can possibly prove invaluable. As we said in the phonebook section of this review, there are shortcuts to make a call or send an SMS via Skype – but they are only available in the stock WinMo Contacts app.If you’ve used the desktop version of Skype, finding your way around the Windows Mobile Skype version wouldn’t be too much of a problem. Slightly annoying is the fact that the app works only as a fullscreen panel – meaning that when you start it, it replaces the current panel.If you’ve missed it, we have some bad news about Skype on Windows Mobile though – it’s been discontinued. So, don’t count on any updates for the Skype app.
Another app that works as a panel only is Facebook. It’s very touch optimized so even on the tiny screen we had no problems hitting the buttons. The interface uses tabs and covers all the messaging and browsing functionality offered by Facebook.The rest of the apps include MSN Money and Weather, Windows Messenger, and a Search app. All of them are standard Windows Mobile stuff and we won't cover them in detail. You can also find a shortcut to the Windows Marketplace in the Start Menu.
Three apps for GPS
We already talked about the voice-guidance prowess of Bing Maps. An important clarification is that it works only in the US and only on a limited set of carriers and phones. Still, the list of supported phones should be expanded with time and we hope the navigation will work in other countries too.The Sony Ericsson Aspen comes with Gokivo for Windows Mobile, which is a SatNav app with voice prompts. It is a trial version though. Anyway, the app is not particularly impressive – the UI is not optimized well and the maps look rather messy.Still, it’s fairly functional. The available maps cover the US and Western Europe. However, it downloads map data over the Internet, so you’ll need a data plan to use this app on the go.
And of course, there’s the Google Maps application, which is well familiar so we’ll skip its description.Anyhow, it’s not like there’s a shortage of paid SatNav apps for Windows Mobile – there’s plenty to choose from if the preloaded options don’t suite you.
A useful tool that comes preinstalled on the Sony Ericsson Aspen is the FastGPS app. It downloads GPS ephemeris data off the Internet, which allows for much faster GPS locks. The data is valid for about a week and you can set FastGPS to automatically download new data every several days or even every time you connect the phone to the computer with Microsoft Sync (useful, if you want to avoid data charges).Even without the ephemeris data, the built-in GPS receiver acquired a lock quite quickly and the signal was strong.Final words
It’s been a while since we last had to deal with a QWERTY-enabled PocketPC candybar. But it looks like we’ll be seeing quite some of them around. We don’t know if the industry is running out of ideas and trying to recycle old concepts. Or quite a few makers have done their homework properly and found potential.
Either way, the Aspen is a prominent member of this new wave of phones, which will have to compete against each other, against rivals like Nokia and RIM, and against the clock – ticking closer to WinPho 7.It’s a tough job and the Aspen knows it all depends on how it balances its strengths and weaknesses. On the plus side, the green credentials will be a key feature for some, others would will appreciate the QWERTY keyboard and the textbook-grade syncing with Outlook and Exchange servers.
Aside from the hardware QWERTY, the other thing that the Aspen has going for it is connectivity. Fast data transfers, WLAN and perfect compatibility with PC will make sense for most business users. Standard USB and audio connectors are more than welcome too. The Aspen has GPS as well, but voice-guided navigation might prove to be a problem – especially if you want it for free.
On the downside, some of the Aspen’s shortcomings might prove to be showstoppers.
The 2.4-inch display is one – its low resolution makes working with documents (and text in general) hard, it’s touch enabled but the OS isn’t exactly thumb-friendly (even on bigger screens). The XPERIA X10 mini can get away with it. But even with the much thumb-friendlier Android, Sony Ericsson had to have the interface tailored to the small screen.
The DivX support is good, but you’ll have to scale all your videos down to QVGA resolution – it would be just as easy/hard to convert them to QVGA .mp4 videos, so it’s not much of a bonus. Flash in the browser is good though and works most of the time – Flash support is problematic on most mobile devices.
But most importantly, the custom UI on the Sony Ericsson Aspen is a mess – there are two interface breeds (skinned and unskinned) and you constantly bounce from one to another.
That makes it very unintuitive and unattractive. What people rightfully demand this days is a capable but dead simple UI, not a loosely stitched combination of two (sometimes three) different interfaces.
You can start on the SPB Mobile Shell homescreen, go to the Slide View to check unread messages and when you choose to reply, you get unskinned WinMo interface to type the message. That’s three different interfaces and it hurts usability.
The hardware part isn’t rosy either. It’s not the most compact and lightweight QWERTY bar and its mid-range features don’t quite justify the physical size. The camera is nothing to write home about and neither are most other features – the CPU inside is not very fast, the plastic finish is no match for stainless steel and so on.
The retail price is still unknown, but assuming it’s around 200 euro (and that’s low balling it), here’s what the Sony Ericsson Aspen is up against.
The Samsung B7330 OmniaPRO runs Windows Mobile 6.5 Standard, so no touchscreen here. You get a 2.6” and slightly higher-res display at 320x320 pixels. There’s a custom UI too but nothing eco-friendly going on.
The Nokia E71 is an option too – no touchscreen again, and it’s Symbian, which does give it free voice-guided navigation and an Office document editor as well. Plus, you can’t complain about the OS – WinMo 6.5 and Symbian are both old timers, despite the few changes here and there.HTC, one of the biggest WinMo manufacturers, has an alternative too – the HTC Snap. Specs are not very impressive, but it’s cheap, solidly built, has a trackball and you can find a carrier-subsidized version (like the HTC Ozone), for free on a contract.
Under the circumstances, even a Palm Pixi Plus sounds good. Bigger touch screen and touch-friendly WebOS, plus a Palm QWERTY keyboard – those have a tradition of being good. Alternatively, you could pick up an older BlackBerry.
There’s more – at mostly the same capabilities as the E71 is the Nokia E63. Some of the features have been cut back and the price has equally been cut down.
On the other hand, if smartphones are not your game, there’s a sizable assortment of QWERTY-enabled bars. The LG GW300 and the Nokia C3 provide good keyboards and IM/SNS integration. You can even go lower – the Samsung B3210 CorbyTXT can satisfy heavy texters with no extra weight of features that go unused but still cost a pretty penny.The Sony Ericsson Aspen is not a bad phone in itself – and probably a good enough try by Sony Ericsson to stay in shape for WinMo 7. It’s just that it’s competing against old phones and it’s not always winning.
We guess it can count on some brand loyalty that goes back to the olden days of Symbian UIQ. But touchscreen has evolved beyond what some thought possible. The Sony Ericsson is obviously trying to keep up and offer the best of both worlds. An effort like this is always admirable but the end result is less a perfect blend and more a series of compromises.
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