Monthly Archives: May 2010

Supplied by Clove

Price: currently available for pre-order

Highlights

Windows Mobile 6.5.3
Sony Ericsson GreenHeart
QWERTY Keypad
Quad-band GSM/EDGE
3.2 Megapixel Camera
A-GPS
Bluetooth
WiFi

The Sony Ericsson Aspen (Faith) is a dying breed for two reasons; it is a new Windows Mobile 6x device and also has a touch screen plus a front facing QWERTY keyboard. There are very few smartphones that come with this configuration, but for a select few they represent the pinnacle of practical design.

This is a pre-production unit and so has none of the accessories and may have some bugs that will be ironed out in time for release, so I will go easy on any small blips that could be resolved by the time you can buy it.

First Impressions

When I first saw the image above I was somewhat excited by the prospect of trying this phone, but it would safe to say that the photographer has done a brilliant job of making it look better than in real life. It’s certainly not ugly, but in black looks like almost every other front keyboarded device on the market. I hate to say this, but there is a touch of ‘i-mate’ in the design of the front.

The back is quite smart and the top has a sense of Sony Ericsson with a useful ridged grip at the bottom. The curved edges add some style which is, sadly, at odds with the rigidness of the front.

Screen

The screen, at 2.4”, is not big and on this phone it seems even smaller than it is. There is a large black surround that seems to be there for no reason at all and this puts it at odds with the size of the keyboard. The size of the text on the home screen sums up this problem more than anything else and it all feels rather cramped. Take the Aspen outside and the experience gets worse; besides being difficult to select anything, even with the stylus, you can barely see anything if the sun has decided to make a brief appearance.

The screen alone makes this device difficult to use, but to be fair Sony Ericsson hasn’t stopped there in terms of creating a smartphone that is almost zero fun to use.

Keyboard

I love how the whole phone creaks when I type (sarcasm intended). The natural method of holding a smartphone when typing requires you to push on the back and on this particular model (could be a pre-production issue?) it creaks a hell of a lot, to the point that you can hear it moving.

The keys are quite pronounced yet also quite small. The typing experience is not dreadful at all, but the fact that the keys have no spacing and are perfectly in line with each other caused me to continually hit the ‘m’ rather than the ‘n’. At least that is what I thought until I realised that the bottom row of letters are shoved over to the left to make way for the comma, full stop and return keys which makes typing awfully difficult. It isn’t completely awful, but the huge amount of space given to the navigation pad and four buttons above the keyboard seem like a waste to me.

Entertainment

This is of course a business device and so entertainment will be low on the list of priorities for potential purchasers. However, this is 2010 and there is little reason why you cannot have both. RIM manages to offer sterling music quality and so does Nokia on the E71 and E72. Sony Ericsson has managed to offer music quality on the Aspen the like of which I have not heard since before the iPod was born. It is woefully bad and simply not worth the effort. There is a decent looking media software setup on board, but the amount of taps to get to a song is far too much.

Video playback quality is also not worth trying- the less I say on that the better. Of course there is gaming which is always useful to pass a few minutes, if you can find any good ones that work at this resolution.

As far as entertainment goes, the Aspen is not the device you need for this purpose.

Call Quality / Signal

Well it’s not all bad. The call quality is surprisingly good with a deep sound that transfers to the speakerphone as well. I would put this as being close to the BlackBerry Bold 9700 which is an impressive effort. Oddly, the sound though the speakerphone is much crisper than when music is played through the speaker- bizarre?

Signal quality is average and I just held a 3G signal in my house whereas many phones have no issue at all in the same location. In my limited tests I would say that it is definitely in the mid-range compared to the other devices I have used.

General Performance

The Aspen is quite speedy and I had no issues with slow downs of freezing. It should be able to handle multiple apps without issue, but general performance is also hindered by the keyboard and tricky to use screen. No processor in the world can make up for bad design.

Camera

See image below- says it all really.

Software

Let’s be honest here. Windows Mobile 6x has had its day and is no longer a serious proposition in a market that is crowded out by operating systems which are getting better by the day. Add to this the fact that the Aspen seems to be designed to make it even harder to use and you are looking at the perfect storm of bad smartphone design.

It got to the point that I could not be bothered to even hunt down the hidden software gems because they all felt hidden to me. At the very least this phone suits Windows Mobile Standard much better and throwing in the Professional version makes no sense at all. It just creates an experience which does not work on any level.

Conclusion

This hasn’t gone well has it? I have no idea why Sony Ericsson has made the Aspen. I do not understand why it has persevered with Windows Mobile, but mostly I do not understand how and why it was designed the way it has been. It could make a usable business smartphone, but there are MUCH better phones out there for this purpose and it excels in no areas at all.

I don’t think I have reviewed a phone as dated and badly designed as this one in a long, long time.