Sony Ericsson Aspen

Intro; Features; Productivity

Have you ever felt the need for a business phone that combines a touchscreen with a full QWERTY keyboard? Well, Sony Ericsson thinks that there is a demand for such devices and thus we have the Aspen, a business phone that combines a touch interface with a full-fledged keyboard.

Features

The Sony Ericsson Aspen runs Windows Mobile 6.5.3 Professional, has a 600MHz processor and 256MB of ROM and RAM. About 100MB of data can be stored on the Aspen’s internally and if you want more storage space, you can use a microSD card up to 16GB. The Aspen’s display is a resistive touchscreen that spans 2.4 inches and is capable of a resolution of 320x240 and 65K color output. The phone also has a 3.2MP fixed focus camera with no flash and connectivity options are well taken care of with Wi-Fi, 3G and GPS support.

Giving a smartphone a small touchscreen and a QWERTY keyboard might seem like a good idea on paper but it doesn’t work very well on the Aspen.

The Aspen’s app needs can be met by the Windows Marketplace from where you can download a number of free or paid apps and games. The Aspen also come with some pre-installed apps including a free one-month trial of F-Secure Mobile security app, a track ID app, a news app and some additional GPS apps.

Productivity

I downloaded the free Office Mobile 2010 from Windows Marketplace to take care of documents on the Aspen. Except for creating docs, the Office Mobile suite can pretty much do everything. You can view and edit Word docs, Excel sheets and PowerPoint Presentations (presentations can be edited provided they are .pptx files). There’s also a pre-installed Adobe Reader app that you can use to view PDF documents.

Like other WinMo devices, the Aspen comes with a fully functional calendar/organizer/scheduler. The organizer lets you schedule multiple tasks for any day and setup multiple alarms as well. After setting up a task you can send it as an appointment to contacts. The organizer also lets you view tasks according to the day, week, month or year.

Setting up a personal e-mail account (especially Gmail) is very easy and you can do it in seconds. For some strange reason, it was only connecting to my Gmail a/c through POP3 although I had also enabled IMAP on my Gmail a/c. Of course, the Aspen also lets you setup  an Exchange e-mail account on the phone.