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
Continue reading ‘Techfaith’s all-singing all-dancing Bono phone’
