Sony Ericsson Aspen Powered by WM 6.5.3 with Capacitive Screen Support
Mobile World Congress will start in few days, where many mobile enthusiasts strongly think Microsoft will showcase a major overhaul of its mobile OS or Windows Mobile 7. This week, with much surprise, Sony Ericsson announced Aspen, a business minded smartphone with front QWERTY, 2.4 QVGA screen; powered for the first time Windows Mobile 6.5.3… The device will be available in Q2. Looking at the version number scheme WM 6.5..3 seems to indicate a simple upgrade, however under the surface, it actually brings some surprises.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yoa5oiq64dE[/youtube]
Video link
What’s new in 6.5.3? This looks like the long-rumored update to Windows Mobile that provides support for capacitive-screen phones. It also provides some browser-speed tweaks.
Zdnet Mary Jo Foley asked Microsoft for a feature list for 6.5.3 and was provided with the following:
Ease of Use features
- Capacitive touchscreen support
- Platform to enable multitouch
- Touch controls throughout system (no need for stylus)
- Consistent Navigation
- Horizontal scroll bar replaces tabs (think settings>system>about
screen) - Magnifier brings touch support to legacy applications
- Simplified out-of-box experience with fewer steps
- Drag and drop icons on Start Screen
IE Browser Performance
- Page load time decreased
- Memory management improved
- Pan & flick gestures smoothed
- Zoom & rotation speed increased
Quality and Customer Satisfaction features
- Updated runtime tools (.NET CF 3.5, SQL CE 3.1)
- Arabic read/write document support
- Watson (error reporting) improvements and bug fixes
[Source Sony Ericsson Via Zdnet]
Although WM 6.5.3 brings capacitive screen support, this SE is NOT equipped with one.
TDhanks Kamai for pointing this out. I thought would be hard to support capacitive on a QVGA display