The Taiwan-based Mobinnova, the manufacturer of Sony Ericsson's next version of XPERIA, recently announced its latest Windows Mobile phone, the Mobinnova ICE, and brought it at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas for demonstration. The handset is seen by some as a rather unusual phone, as it basically has no visible buttons in the front when it’s off.

The new Mobinnova ICE features touch-sensitive controls on the front side, and the list includes the 3" display, which provides a 240x400 pixel resolution, as well as the bar of action buttons placed near the screen and the virtual cursor pad, which lights up when you touch it. Haptic feedback – vibration – is well enhanced, meaning that users will know very well what they are touching.

According to the company, the handset comes with a 528MHz Qualcomm 7201A processor and is running Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional. The main feature list of the device includes 3G capabilities, GPS support, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for connectivity, a 3-megapixel camera, along with TV out and FM radio, as well as an accelerometer.

Mobinnova also announced that the phone would come with a few custom software options that have been included so as to differentiate it from other Windows Mobile-powered handsets. MobiFriends comes as a carousel of pictures of users' friends, similar enough with T-Mobile's MyFaves, yet it sports eight friends instead of five. As soon as a photo is tapped, the Mobinnova ICE offers a range of modalities the person can be contacted. In addition, the company also included a wide range of different custom menus that have large icons, offering users an easy way to cycle through different features without having to pull out a stylus.

On the other hand, if you manage to press a wrong button, the Windows Mobile home screen pops up. Moreover, the screen also gets cluttered with a lot of icons that have different orientations, making it rather hard to figure which way the phone should be turned. The OS might also have something to do with this, and it too should see some updates in the near future.