After the successful launch of the Sony Xperia S (Sony’s first exclusive brand phone), Sony introduced another Sony exclusive brand Xperia phone. This is the Sony Xperia Sola. This is also the first Xperia phone to come pre-installed with a cool new feature called floating touch technology. Well, let’s talk more about said feature later, but first let me describe what this phone is all about.
This phone comes with a 3.7″ capacitive touchscreen. This will also allow your finger to register anything up to 20mm away and above the phone screen. This is a cool feature. The sad news is that this amazing feature is limited to phone.Built-in browser and live wallpapers.
When it comes to hardware, this phone comes with a 1GHz dual-core processor and Mali 400 GPU, along with 512MB of RAM. You will also enjoy 8 GB of internal storage. With its microSD card slot, you can add more storage space for all your files.
The phone comes with a 5MP camera and can record 720p videos. It comes with an integrated 1320 mAh battery and also features NFC. The phone comes with Android Gingerbread for its operating system, but you’ll be able to upgrade to the latest iteration of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich, in the second or third quarter of this year.
Now, let’s move on to the newest and most innovative feature of the phone, the “floating touch”. As mentioned above, this technology will allow you to control things without touching the phone screen. All you have to do is swipe your finger up to 20mm above the phone screen and you can control this phone.
Sony research engineer Erik Hellman and one of the inventors of this new technology explained it in a detailed blog. But let me sum it up for you. Said Floating Touch technology combined existing capacitive touch screen implementations. You need conductivity for a capacitive touch screen to work properly. However, there are two types of screen that differ in the strength of the signal it receives.
There are autocapacitive screens that have powerful signals. This can detect a human’s finger from 22mm, but it also has limitations. They also do not support multitouch.
There are also multicapacitive touch screens that work with multitouch. However, in order for them to reduce an exact position, they have to reduce the signal strength so that they can register a floating finger.
This is where Sony decided to bring the two together in its floating touchscreen. Sony explained that by increasing the existing capacitive touch sensor and lowering the threshold for its touch registration, it is possible to differentiate between floating touch and conventional touch. The only drawback is that the floating touch is limited to the phone browser and live wallpapers only. But then again, Sony promises to open up APIs for its developers to upgrade this Gingerbread device to Ice Cream Sandwich.
These are the features of the Sony Xperia Sola and its floating touch explained.