Sony Ericsson’s Touch and type “green” phone. The Aspen

With an effort to change the adverse affects on the environment many brands are focusing on “Going Green”. To reduce the harm caused to the environment and reduce the use of natural resources that may be depleting from the face of the planet. Using recycled materials to produce a lot of goods. Sony Ericsson also wanted to be within the same league, so they are now using recycled plastics basically attained from discarded bottles and cds to produce the plastic needed for their phones. The Aspen has been built quiet well and feels sturdy, even with its all plastic construction. The cover at the back of the phone comes on pretty tightly and the buttons feel in place and don’t have any unnecessary free play.

ASPEN, which is based on  windows mobile 6 platform for phone that has a Resistive touch display with a full QWERTY keypad. At a first glance at the phone reveals a nice 2.4 inch display with a relatively edged out qwerty keypad with big illuminated letters, with a 5 way navigational pad and 4 distinct buttons on the front side with a volume up/down button on the right side of the phone, a micro usb port on the left side and a 3.2 megapixel camera on the back panel, with the speakers next to it and a power/standby button on the top.

Based upon Windows Mobile which comes preinstalled on the device shows some rather slow responsive interface and certain lag in certain scenarios. Specially when ending a call where it takes about 3-4 secs to return back to the home screen. Even though it is powered by a 600 mhz processor the OS makes it seem much slower. The device does pack a lot of preloaded softwares like Skype, Facebook and twitter, with google latitude maps for navigation and a pocket office suite for those who would like to edit any attachments they might receive in mails. The operating system enables 6 tiles for homescreens which can be customized according to the user’s preferences with shortcuts placed under the call receive button also offers a few shortcuts to your disposal. The user interface is similar to the XPERIA series from SE.

Since this is a java based  mobile phone a user can choose from a plethora of java applications designed for the windows mobile format. The user interface is quite interactive when using the stylus but not very friendly to the finger, so if you want to perform a quick operation without having to pull the stylus out it may not be all that easy, since resistive touch display require a precision and a slight force. The  user interface is somehow gesture controlled so you may find kinetic scrolling when navigating menus, or options. Information like the date and time, weather, communication summary is shown on the home screen. Which also includes messages and call records, and a launcher button that shows the recently opened applications.

The call tests performed with this phone provided some disappointing results. The earpiece volume even at its max is ridiculously low, even when we were stressing our voice to be audible, the aspen was just unable to provide a clear sound, and in zone 2 it just could not sustain a call, most of the time it showed no network so it was struggling to even keep a sustained network, let alone a call. The ringer too is very soft and in loud environments one cannot hear the phone ringing, so there’s a high probability of missing a call unless the user feels the phone vibrate. So even the loudspeaker wasn’t that impressive, overall it had a very poor call performance.

The multimedia features of this phone are pretty good, although it does take some time to load applications or build up lists, once loaded the media player works very well and has a simple, easy to use interface, and supports almost all windows audio formats, same with the video player. The bundled earphones are pretty basic and provide no special features or sound quality,

The camera is a 3.2 megapixel camera without autofocus or a flash, so its more or less a basic camera with nothing much to offer. The picture quality is average and so is the video capture quality. The phone uses a micro usb port to transfer data to and from the phone, at a rate of about 3 mb/s which is pretty reasonable and about 80kb/s via Bluetooth which could have been a little faster. It comes with an onboard usable memory of about 230 mb and a hot swappable micro SD slot which can support a card up to 16 GB in capacity. Wifi on this phone was not as easy as 1-2-3 and one.

It is essential for us to know what kind of encryption the router was using, and then we had to uncheck a box where it enabled the pass code box. Browsing the net on the phone was fast and smooth. It comes loaded with the internet explorer browser. The Wi-Fi connectivity was strong with all bars in place when we went far from the router or to a different room. The battery provides a fair amount of backup thanks to its 1500mAh lithium polymer battery.

Specifications :
3G HSDPA, GSM ; Display: 2.4-inch, 320 x 240 pixels, 65K colours; Memory: 230 MB inbuilt, microSD expandable; Camera: 3.2 MP; weight: 130 grams

Pros :
Good multimedia features
Loads of connectivity options
Responsive resistive touch display

Cons :
Poor sound quality over call
Very slow UI
Uncomfortable keypad for extended usage
 

Sony Ericsson’s Touch and type “green” phone. The Aspen

With an effort to change the adverse affects on the...