One of the most interesting features of the Mobile World Congress was the opportunity to get some hands-on time with the Chinese manufacturers whose phones we in the west wouldn’t otherwise get to see. One of the most fascinating was TechFaith, a large handset design company, started by ex-employees of Motorola China.
It’s made more than 100 handsets for most of the top Chinese operators as well as some in other Asian countries and focuses heavily on R&D. At MWC, its stand seemed to feature mainly professionally-oriented designs using Qualcomm-based CDMA technology and running the Windows Mobile OS.
The first of its phones we looked at was a fully-featured beast codenamed ‘Bono’ - nothing to do with the U2 frontman we’re sure.
It was quite a chunky 3G phone with a 3 inch touchscreen, a slide out QWERTY keyboard, GPS and two cameras - a back-mounted 2MP and a front-mounted 300KP for video calls. Other features included wi-fi, Bluetooth 2.0, a mini USB port and a microSD slot plus a hotline to various heads of state around the world (nah, we made the last bit up).
More words and pics after the break
Talk time was rated at 3 hours while standby was 120 hours.
Not the sort of thing that aesthetically would go down well in western markets, but we reckon it won’t be long before Techfaith hardware (however rebranded) will be in stacked high in the Carphone Warhouse.
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