Thursday, May 8, 2008

Philips to Unveil Its First Full-Touchscreen Handset

Touchscreen mobile devices are slowly but (almost) surely taking over the world, and pretty soon all the important handset manufacturers will have touchscreen handsets in their portfolios. Philips is the latest producer that seems to be working on a full touchscreen phone, if we were to believe some recently leaked images that show a pretty nice-looking Philips X800.

The X800 is said to feature a wide touchscreen display with "e2e" technology, standing for "edge-to-edge" – but we're not sure what this means exactly in terms of functionality.

The available images with X800 don't seem to show a real device, but just some renderings of how it should look like. Anyway, the phone apparently works on Vodafone's network from Hong Kong (which is actually called SmarTone-Vodafone), so it's highly possible to feature 3G connectivity. Aside from this, we can also see a Media player, Wi-Fi and Web browser.

What's a bit strange is that, although we can see a camera icon in the phone's menu, there's no trace of this feature on its back case. A touchscreen handset to lack a camera would be pretty weird to see, but since the images we're talking about most probably don’t depict the "real full-touchscreen Philips phone", it’s best if we wait for the official pictures and details.

Philips X800 might be part of the Xenium family, known for the long battery life they're able to provide. And by "long" we mean up to one month of stand-by time, which would indeed be awesome for a touchscreen handset.

All in all, if Philips is really preparing a full-touchscreen device, we can only be happy about it, since more products and an increased competition usually lead to better products for end-users. We'll find out soon if the X800 is real or not and if it can be considered a threat for the full-touchscreen handsets that are already on the market.

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