As we all can see the ownership of smartPhone is growing and the SmartPhone market has been growing rapidly in 2009 and will continue this year. Then as a result, more and more corporations have entered the heated area of SmartPhone! Lenovo gave us a chance to check out their latest smartphone at CES 2010.
The LePhone is Android-based with a complete facelift and hardly any of the original OS sticking out. I wonder they intended it to be, but it seems like a sort of interesting mix of webOS, iPhone, and Android features. I quite liked it. In shape it’s quite pleasing, a little big, but with a good heft and solid feel. The screen is a gorgeous 3.7″ 800×480 OLED one. It’s got volume buttons on the left side, there, and a reprogrammable button on the right. It’s got a Pre-like dark area at the bottom that’s also touch-sensitive, and works as either a home button or for simple swiping gestures. It’s got the usual fixins: GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and all that, and it’s running on a Snapdragon processor, though I couldn’t seem to suss out the RAM or internal storage. We’ll hear more about that soon.
Lephone keyboardThe OS is Android, and should be 2.0 at launch, though they declined to say when that might be. It’s completely skinned, though — Lenovo has it equipped with a sort of dual mode home screen, with one (the flower) being a contact jump-off point: you scroll through your contacts and then can pick a petal to message, call, or whatever. It’ll work if you can choose which contacts are included in that scrolling list, but if you have a couple hundred it’ll get confusing mighty fast. The other home screen is a series of widgets, they call it Widget Space, with stuff like weather, stocks, latest emails, that sort of thing. There’s also media playback and all that — there was a little screen for selecting streaming TV channels or what appeared to be some pre-prepared content, movie trailers and such. The apps “drawer” is now a series of pages, like iPhone apps. It’s a proven technique, though of course slightly derivative. There’s a connector on the left side with a cover that attaches magnetically. It lets the Lephone connect to what is envisioned as a series of peripherals. And also a keyboard. Although the key layout is tweaked in a slightly weird way. But it worked normally and actually closed up to form a large clamshell you could carry around.
The device will probably be released in China first, then expand to the US, and this couldn’t be soon, still I was impressed by the phone and the complete little ecosystem they had going. I love some Lenovo, and it looks like they know what they’re doing. So how do you feel about this? Among all these SmartPhone storms would you pick this one for the near future of your life? Tell me!
1/7/10
Lenovo’s Lephone
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