Best Qwerty Smartphone 2010

Emblaze Mobile First Else – The New Kid On The Smartphone Block

Unbeknownst to many in the mobile phone community, there’s a mobile phone company called Emblaze Mobile based in Israel that is poised to do battle with entrenched smartphone makers starting this year.

It’s a nine-year old company that operates under the group umbrella of Emblaze Ltd., a small Anglo-Israeli IT company in the business of providing software and communication solutions since 1994.

A Little History

Emblaze Mobile has been specializing on designing cutting-edge technologies for mobile telephony since 1998 even before getting incorporated.   It has been marketing low cost feature phones that commands a fairly good size of the Israeli and Middle Eastern markets, especially its Touch & which was also marketed in Europe in 2006.

Emblaze Mobile is now known as Else Ltd shifting to the new name after announcing its Emblaze Mobile First Else smartphones back in November 2009.  Emblaze Mobile embarked on the “Monolith” project that had a Japanese company as a strategic partner, Access, which is one of the world’s leading providers of mobile software solutions and is best known for its net browser NetFront as well the Access Linux OS used by many companies worldwide.

It is also the maker of Garnet OS derived from the Palm OS.  The joint project produced a unique Access Linux-based platform called Else Intuition.

High End Features

Finally out from its classified Monolith product, the new smartphone’s all-black slab 116 x 57 x 13mm body comes out as an unabashedly inspired design form the monolith in the movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey.  What sets its Else Intuition OS apart is its gesture-controlled UI that is similar to what the iPhone has but goes a step farther with more menus controllable by thumb gestures and a unique dial-up graphic menu calls “sPlay.”

In addition, it has complete multitasking capability and a media store available for Apps developers on the new platform as Emblaze will be releasing is API together with the handset.  It’s good to know that for a company starting out to venture into smartphones, it recognizes this early that a successful smartphone needs a good online apps store

Demoed at a launch event in Japan last December and launched in London this week, the First Else looks like a Nokia N900 but without the QWERTY keypad. It’s designed to be operated with just one hand courtesy of its capacitive touchscreen and a persistent display of controls on the right side of the screen.

What immediately strikes you is its 3.5” Wide-VGA (854 x 480) display and a high end 5 megapixel autofocus camera with image stabilization.   It’s a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE phone on 2G with UMTS/3.5G and HSDPA data connectivity, WiFi, GPS, accelerometer and proximity sensors, Bluetooth 2,0 and USB 2.0.

Internal memory comes at 16 GB though a 32 GB version is being readied.  Neither version seems capable of microSD expandability. It is powered by the same Texas Instrument OMAP 3430 processor powering the iPhone 3Gs, Motorola Droid and Nokia N900.  Incidentally, these three smartphones would be its main competitors.

Availability

The Emblaze Mobile First Else Linux smartphone is expected to reach European markets by the second quarter of 2010 and will be making its product debut in the UK.  Emblaze Mobile is already negotiating with the major mobile network providers in Europe and the US.  Pricing information has yet to reach the public but this is now affordable handset. With its feature set and a remarkably unique OS, expect this to compete in the high end upscale markets.

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