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.
Slide View looks a lot like the Windows Mobile 6.5 homescreen
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.
The Today homescreen of Windows Mobile 6.5
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.
The Sony Ericsson panel is simple but functional
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.
The Lifestyle and Professional homescreens of SPB Mobile Shell
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.
Plenty of widgets to choose from
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.
The custom phonebook
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 launcher of SPB Mobile Shell
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.
A preview of the Skype and Facebook panels
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.
Panels can be set on a timer to switch automatically
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.
The Task Manager has some shortcomings
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.
The phonebook
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.
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 Slide View messaging menu
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.
Typing an SMS on the Aspen
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.
Browsing the email inbox • reading an email
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.
The image gallery
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.
Rotating, browsing and zooming into images
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.
The music player
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 music control panel
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 FM radio has a slide-up control panel too
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.
TrackID is on board
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.
The video player
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.
Cutting to the point – here go the results so you can see for yourselves.
Sony Ericsson Aspen vs Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro frequency response graphs
Disappointing 3MP snapper
The Sony Ericsson Aspen is no cameraphone – it has a 3MP fixed-focus camera with maximum image resolution of 2048×1536 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 camera interface
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.
Sony Ericsson Aspen camera samples
Synthetic resolution
We also snapped our resolution chart with the Sony Ericsson Aspen. You can check out what that test is all about here.
Sony Ericsson Aspen resolution chart photo • 100% crops
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.
The camcorder interface
Here is a sample video for you to see.
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.
Some of the connectivity options
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.
Internet Explorer Mobile 6 does Flash
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).
The spell check kept getting in our way
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 calendar got skinned
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 Windows Mobile Calendar
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.
To-Do list • The Notes app allows handwriting too, as well as text input • the calculator
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.
Office Mobile allows viewing and editing Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote files
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.
Opening PDF documents with Adobe Reader LE
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 marketplace isn’t exactly brimming with content just yet
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.
Universal Search
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.
The Bing app
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 YouTube app
The Sony Ericsson Aspen also comes with a handy news reader – Express News.
The Express News app
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.
The vanilla Contacts app lets you call with Skype
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.
The Skype 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 Facebook panel
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.
Bing Maps can plot routes
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.
Gokivo SatNav app
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.
Google Maps is well familiar
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).
FastGPS allows you to download A-GPS data
Even without the ephemeris data, the built-in GPS receiver acquired a lock quite quickly and the signal was strong.
