Google’s mobile platform, Android, has had a bit of a slow start, but 2010 is shaping up to be the year that Google’s OS will appear on well over a dozen new handsets.
In China, with its plethora of small and fast-acting electronics firms, Android is getting a boost by being adopted by a lot of brands that you’ve likely not heard of before. Indeed, several of these brands have never even made a mobile phone before–but it seems that hardware is easy to put together, and can be rendered very appealing by free, open, and good-looking software, as Android undoubtedly is. (That’s all got to be heart-breaking news for Nokia. Anyhoooo…).
Secondly, the Access Cphone. Someone at Access decided to make Android more friendly and familiar to local users with a very cartoonish UI skin which, perhaps only in my opinion, makes Android look like some old, slap-dash Samsung affair, and totally puts me off. (A Chinese Web site has a hands-on video of the phone and UI). No specifications yet–aside from a 3.5-inch screen, which seems to be de rigeur on smartphones these days–and no launch date set either.
The Cphone has been commissioned by China Telecom–ordinarily a landline company and ISP–to take on Apple’s iPhone, which is soon heading to China Unicom, as well as to take on China Mobile’s upcoming “Ophone”. Pictured below is the Cphone:
by Steven Millward, China
[via cnet Asia]
