Slashdot Mirror
China Launches Linux-Based Smartphone
An anonymous reader writes "This news item at LinuxDevices provides photos and specs of a new Linux-based smartphone being launched today in China. The device, called the E2800, sells for about $600, and targets business users, offering PDA functions, touch-screen, handwriting recognition, a camera, and memory expansion to 512MB through an SD memory card, the article says. The device's manufacturer is a Shanghai company named E28. The E2800 is a 900/1800MHz, GSM/GPRS class 10 device based on dual ARM9 processors, running embedded Linux with a 2.4-series kernel. Other recent Linux-based mobile phone announcements have been Japan's NTT DoCoMo's 3G phones and Motorola's A760."
Dont be too hasty to judge. China includes places such as Hong Kong, a place I lived for several years. I can personally vouch that they usually have new technologies two or three _years_ before America. America has only recently gotten into the cellphone fad, yet almost everyone had a cell phone in china a couple years ago. When you speak of China, you must remember the large land mass it controls: Shanghai and Beijing and Hong Kong are still huge consumer-ridden industrialized areas.
How the fuck was that insightful?
;-)
Ok mods how about this.
I imagine in the future we will be using...um...future things that are more futuristic than now. I forsee people using things that are futuristic. !!! I can tell the future I can.
First off, even if you put an Athlon 3200+ in a phone it's still a phone. You can't type at it and unless it has 99% voice recognition [for entering text] it's useless. Well actually more than that. Have you ever tried to read C source out loud?
I actually forsee a small market for these devices. I mean sure PDAs are trendy but they're not as popular as laptops or desktops. At my college way more people have laptops because while they're a bit bulkier they do have keyboards, guts and large monitors [my 14.1" laptop monitor is HUGE compared to a 2.9" or whatever the avg. PDA has] that make using the computer less than painful.
What will catch on are lighter laptops. If Compaq made my laptop in a "less than 7lbs" model I would be very very happy. However, I'm willing to carry it around [well it's not that heavy anyways] considering I get a nearly 100% sized keyboard, 14.1" screen, 768MB of ram, 60GB of disk, an Athlon-M 2400+ [barton!], 2USB, 1394, Ethernet, serial, parallel, PS/2, svideo, VGA ports, a floppy drive and a DVD-CDRW drive....
That's a bit more than in the avg 600$ PocketPC device...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
The news story reads:
A Chinese company based in Shanghai named "E28" has quietly been selling Linux-based smartphones in China since August,...
So, how is this "China", the country launching a product? It's a company doing the launch, and quietly at that. When Cisco releases a new product, do we say "The United States Launches..."?
I suppose slashdot editors see product lines as the new arms race, where products created in a market are attributed to the country as a whole.
Why is it that every time a Chinese company does something the slashdot article begins with "China does Blah-blah-blah... plop."
You know, there are over a billion people in China. I'm sure many of them even have some small ammount of autonomy from the evil borg communist collective that americans seem to think dominates them all. Is this just simple racism or is it some kind of fear complex?