If there’s one industry that I have a hard time keeping track of, it is the smartphone industry. As if the continuous stream of new models coming out is not enough, we also have a continuous stream of leaks, rumors and spy shots coming out at us as all times. There are just too many of them to cope with it seems. Nevertheless, today I bring you news of the two latest smartphone leaks that have been doing their rounds of the Internet. One is the Sony Ericsson Kurara and the other is the Motorola Motus. With names like that, my spellcheck has a hard time too.
When the Kurara was first leaked some time back, it was taken to be the smaller brother of the Sony Ericsson super phone – Aino. Its smaller camera and lack of details led us to believe that it would take the place of a lower mid-range phone that had basic features and the goodness of a touchscreen and 720p HD standard.
But now it seems like there’s much more to it than meets the eye. Forget being the understudy, this looks like the real star in its own right. That is because it has recently been revealed that this phone is actually powered by an ARM Cortex A8 processor and PowerVR graphics.
All of this is combined with 256MB RAM, which is pretty hefty for a mobile platform. Now when you put an aging Symbian 80 OS into this mix, you realize that this definitely a beast in the making. The OS is a lightweight compare to what the chip can handle, so reports of its amazing speed is completely believable.
In addition to that, the graphics performance ensures smooth video performance. Although it may not be the as powerful as the Aino but us lesser mortals can live with something like this. My guess is that this will become a nice multimedia smartphone that will sit at the higher side of mid-range and woo consumers with its blend of affordability and speed. Sony Ericsson just might have a winner here. [read]
Next we come to the Motorola Motus. Banking on the growing popularity of the Android platform, Motorola has been making a slew of new phones from one basic template. All of these phones come in the same form factor – candybar shape, slideout full QWERTY keypad and Android OS. There are obviously changes in the features and the components used but they all look very similar to each other – Cliq, Dext, Droid and now Motus.
So leaks tell us that the Motus, as seen in an October leak of Motorola’s internal roadmap, is very real. Yesterday we had a spy shot to talk about and now we have a new name, the specifications and features as well.
Apparently, Motorola has just registered the brand name Backflip and the description matches the Motus pretty well. The phone is apparently headed for T-Mobile and will have features like reverse flip keypad and rear directional touchpad. Sounds a bit gimmicky to me.
Specifications of the Motus/Backflip include – triband WDCMA 850/1900/2100MHz, 7.2Mbps HSDPA, 3.1” capacitive screen with a 480×320 resolution, microSD expansion slot and a Qualcomm 528MHz CPU. [read]
It is not clear what version of the Android the phone will be using. Meaning whether they would customize the OS like they with the CLIQ (Oh the MOTOBLUR horror) or whether they will go with pristine Google Experience standard Android installation. But it looks like this will be a model that will be quite far down the ladder from the Droid.
