The Sony Ericsson Aspen, codenamed Faith, may be one of the earliest handsets to debut with Windows Mobile 6.5.3, which brings the Start menu to the bottom along with icons for more finger-friendliness, support for capacitive touchscreens, memory optimizations, and improvements in browsing speeds. The other cool part about the Aspen, for tree-huggers and eco-conscious consumers, is that it will be part of Sony Ericsson’s GreenHeart lineup, which brings environmentally friendly materials and reduced energy consumption.

There will be two editions of the Aspen, both of which will support quad-band GSM/EDGE radios, but will vary on the 3G support depending on regions. Fortunately, for North American consumers, there will be a version for us too! The 3G supports are for the HSPA 900/2100 or 850/900/2100.

The SE Aspen looks like a mashup of the Fujitsu Siemens Pocket Loox T830 meets Palm Centro for the geometric navigation buttons meets Nokia E72 for the keyboard–overall, a very attractive design package!

Like Treos and BlackBerry smartphones, the SE Aspen will have a touchscreen and front-facing hardware QWERTY keyboard. Unfortunately, the screen landscape-oriented touchscreen maxes out at QVGA resolution, which will place it in the same class as the HP iPAQ Glisten rather than the higher-resolution Trophy. Perhaps, the more modest screen specs and eco-friendliness of the handset warrants a change in branding–this handset doesn’t seem to be part of the XPERIA lineup.

The handset is expected to be shown at Mobile World Congress for a second quarter debut.

(via: Engadget)