With all of the high-end smartphones and tablets moving to dual processors and larger screen sizes, technologies that used to be cutting edge only a year ago are now trickling down to the budget end of the market – a trend that Huawei has taken advantage of with the new smartphone and tablet it announced at Mobile World Congress.
The IDEOS X3
This is a compact 3.2-inch smartphone running the latest Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) operating system. Huawei claims it’s the thinnest device on the market with a 3.2-inch screen, measuring 11.2mm thick and weighing under 115g. Other specs include a 600MHz Qualcomm processor, 256MB of RAM, and a multi-touch capacitive display with 480 x 320 resolution.
Like the Nexus S, the IDEOS X3 is a ‘Google Experience’ phone that runs the vanilla Android 2.3 system – theoretically, this means you should be able to download updates to the operating system directly from Google rather than having to wait up to a year for the carriers to release them. It’s expected to be available in Asian markets in mid 2011.
The S7 Slim
This is an update to the Telstra T-Touch Tab, and as you can guess from its name, it’s sleeker than the original tablet, managing to shave 60g off its weight to a more manageable 440g, as well as 3mm from the waistline.
One of the biggest complaints about the T-Touch Tab (also made by Huawei) was the unresponsive resistive touchscreen, and the S7 Slim improves on this by switching to the superior capacitive technology.
The processor has also been upgraded from a pokey 768MHz to a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, and it runs Android 2.2 out of the box. Even better: it has a built-in HDMI port and supports 720p HD video playback. Global availability is expected in April.
