February 20th, 2012
Published by: VR-Zone
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Panasonic gets back in the international phone business with the Eluga Source: http://vr-zone.com/articles/panasonic-gets-back-in-theinternational-phone-business-with-the-eluga/14954.html February 20th, 2012
Some of you might remember the days when Panasonic sold mobile phones outside of Japan, in fact, the company made some of the smallest, usable phones ever made shortly before pulling out of the global market. Panasonic has finally decided that it's time to get back into the global handset business again, but this time around we're talking smartphones and its upcoming Eluga handset bringing some of the Japanese tech to the rest of the world. Some of you might remember the days when Panasonic sold mobile phones outside of Japan, in fact, the company made some of the smallest, usable phones ever made shortly before pulling out of the global market. Panasonic has finally decided that it's time to get back into the global handset business again, but this time around we're talking smartphones and its upcoming Eluga handset bringing some of the Japanese tech to the rest of the world. For the time being the Panasonic Eluga will only be available in Europe, but it's likely that it will show up in other parts of the world. Some of the specifications are a bit underwhelming, while others have so far been anything but standard features on Android smartphones. Starting with the not so exciting, we're looking at 1GHz dual core Texas Instruments OMAP4430 SoC with PowerVR SGX540 graphics – hardly what you'd call cutting edge these days – 8GB of flash memory – again fairly average and what's worse is that there's no memory card slot – and finally 1GB of RAM, which at least isn't too bad.
The screen is a 4.3-inch OLED unit with qHD resolution (960x540 pixels), which is still considered pretty good, albeit not super high-end any more with the latest crop of devices moving to 720p displays. The handset sports 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, DLNA, a micro USB port, a GPS receiver, various sensors, an 8Megapixel camera and somewhat unusually – at least for the European market – NFC support. Another rare addition is that the handset is water and dust proof according to the IP57 standard which means that it can be submerged down to depths of up to 1 meter for 30 minutes without any of the internal components taking any damage. Finally it has a micro SIM slot, something that seems to become increasingly popular with the handset makers.
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