Back in January 2012, Sony Ericsson
mobile communications was renamed to Sony mobile communications after
Sony bought out Ericsson’s stake. Since then, just a handful of phones
have been announced and even fewer have been released as of now. The
first Sony-only branded phone was the Xperia S, a fairly competent
smartphone that was praised for its screen and media capabilities but
let down by some poor software. It was also Sony’s first dual core
smartphone.
In the recently concluded Mobile World
Congress 2012, Sony announced a bunch of new smartphones covering pretty
much every price range. Then came something completely new and
revolutionary, Sony announced the Xperia Sola, the world’s first
floating touch smartphone! Besides being a good looking, solid
smartphone in the usual sense, the Xperia Sola offers a pretty cool new
feature where you can control the UI just by hovering your finger over
the screen instead of actually touching it. I’m sure it conjures up
Minority Report-esque images in your head, it sure does in mine!
This floating touch technology is made
possible by the usage of both self and mutual capacitance to detect a
finger upto 20mm above the screen. Normally, just one of those sensors
is used in touchscreen phones. Floating Touch was made in collaboration
with Cypress Technologies and all software will work perfectly well with
it. The only drawback is, not all applications are developed to respond
to floating touch gestures. Also, multiple simultaneous gestures are
possible only when your fingers touch the screen. For the floating
touch, you will have to use just one finger. Besides this, the Xperia
Sola works exactly like a high end touchscreen smartphone when used as
such. As of now, only a few native applications like Sony’s inbuilt web
browser respond to floating touch, but this number is sure to increase
once the phone is launched sometime in Q2, 2012.
The floating touch technology allows for
better control of the UI and gives mobile users access to hover events
normally possible only on full size PC’s. This also opens up avenues for
mobile gaming where floating touch offers another degree of control.
The Xperia Sola also features live exclusive wallpapers that respond to
floating touch. At launch, the Xperia Sola will come with Android 2.3,
but an update to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) is due in the summer.
This is an important update because Android 4.0 allows third party
applications to make use of hover events and floating touch can be used
on most applications by then. The Xperia Sola also has features such as
3D surround sound (xLoud) and access to Sony’s new entertainment
network. It runs on ST Ericsson’s NovaThoa U8500 SoC (system on a chip)
which includes a dual core ARM Cortex A9 processor at 1Ghz, 512MB RAM
and an ARM® Mali 400 GPU along with a built in HSPA modem.
Now, for the specs:
★ Processor: Dual core ARM Cortex A9 at 1Ghz★ RAM: 512MB
★ GPU: ARM Mali 400
★ Storage: 8GB built-in (5GB usable), expandable up to 32GB
★ Display: 3.7inch screen, 480×534 resolution, 265ppi, capacitive multi touch with scratch resistant glass
★ Camera: 5MP back camera with LED flash and 720p recording, front facing camera for video calls
★ Connectivity: Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, USB 2.0 and MicroUSB expansion slots
★ Expected Price: Rs: 21,000 – 24,000 INR.
0 comments
Post a Comment