Sony Ericsson Aspen

The Sony Ericsson Aspen is a Blackberry-style Windows smartphone, and is the first handset of its type from this manufacturer. Sony Ericsson say that the Aspen is a handset with a conscience, a silly bit of marketing fluff in support of the Aspen's slightly greener than usual credentials, which place it in Sony Ericsson's "GreenHeart" range.

Size and Weight :

The dimensions & weighs of Sony Ericsson Aspen are 117 x 60 x 12.5 mm & 130 g .

Network and connectivity:

Connectivity includes dualband UMTS/HSPA (900/2100) and quadband GSM/EDGE, though Sony Ericsson are also prepping a triband 850/900/2100 UMTS/HSPA version for North America. It supports 2G Network (GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900), 3G Network (HSDPA 900 / 2100), HSDPA 850 / 900 / 2100. The local connectivity options of the Sony Ericsson Aspen include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB and a 3.5mm audio jack, GPRS (Class 10 32 - 48 kbps), EDGE (Class 10, 236.8 kbps), 3G (HSDPA, 7.2Mbps; HSUPA, 2Mbps), WLAN Wi-Fi (802.11b/g), Bluetooth (v2.1 with A2DP), USB (microUSB v2.0). Aspen will be available in two versions, 900/2100 MHz and 850/900/2100 MHz.

Camera and Video:

The Aspen’s 3.15-megapixel camera lacks autofocus or a flash, and while the latter doesn’t particularly disappoint us – our disdain of LED flash units is well known – the fixed-focus makes it of limited use. The Sony Ericsson Aspen features a 2.4-inch TFT touchscreen (240×320 pixels) and 65k colors. Although the 2.4-inch display is a resistive touchscreen complete with a pull out stylus we found ourselves more often than not using the hardware keys to navigate it.

Entertainment Features:

The software is Windows Mobile 6.5.3, and it seems that Sony Ericsson have added a little polish to it by using their own "Panels" which include YouTube, Facebook, an On-The-Road Panel, CNN and Weather plus others. And of course there's all the usual stuff here such as Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office Mobile and windows Media Player. It supports Stereo FM radio with RDS, Games, Google Maps Latitude, Bing Maps, Skype, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter apps. The media player supports MP3/eAAC+/WAV/WMA, MP4/H.264/H.263/WMV player.

Sony Ericsson Aspen is the revival of the business phone line up from Sony Ericsson. After the failure of their Symbian UIQ packed business phone, they have turned to WinMo. Aspen will be available in Iconic Black and White Silver.