The very exciting ZTE Skate, which we’re looking forward to immensely after 2010′s staggeringly well-featured ZTE Blade (rebranded as the legendary Orange San Francisco in the UK), has been given a price by ZTE’s French office – with a “less than” €200 tag attached to it. And that’s unsubsidised, too.
200 euros translates to around £180 at today’s exchange rates, so expect it to be nearer the £200 mark in the UK once taxes and so on have been taken into account.
The price, as reported by French site GPS and Co which met with ZTE and played with the phone, is therefore twice that of the Orange San Francisco – but in return for a 4.3″ mobile running an untouched version of Android 2.3.3 that’s surely going to make the Skate another storming hit among enthusiasts and mainstream buyers.
This morning Huawei was our favourite Chinese manufacturer, but now we’re siding with ZTE again. 2012 may well be the year the Chinese take over completely.
The Panasonic Eluga marks the company’s return to the European mobile phone scene years after several years of absence, and it’s come back to us with a moderately high-spec Android model that features a rather stylish, slim case.
The HTC One V is HTC’s third entry in its high-profile new HTC One range, offering a smaller 3.7″ display running on a single-core 1GHz processor. It is is very much the “affordable” option in HTC’s newest Android series, but…
The HTC One S is the piggy in the middle of HTC’s 2012 line-up, offering a 4.3″ AMOLED display inside a very slim and stylish aluminium chassis. The end result is a phone that’s very, very slim and stylish.
HTC’s new quad-core monster, the 4.7″ flagship for 2012 that introduces the Tegra 3 processor to mobile phones, updates HTC’s range to Android 4.0 and brings us the supposedly streamlined version 4.0 of HTC’s Sense user interface.
Sony returns with an all-new mobile design for 2012, pairing a dual-core processor with a 720p display. It’s a lovely phone, but is it enough to end our Samsung and HTC obsession?
LG’s updated Prada phone comes with an absolutely crazy black & white theme, but is it just for fashionable suit wearers who want to make themselves look a bit more interesting?
k0zmic
/ June 8, 2011Looks like it will have Flash support. The CPU and GPU is weaker than on the Huawei though.
Alberto Zaragoza
/ June 8, 2011Here in Spain, Yoigo (Telia Sonera) is selling the Blade for 79€ on prepaid. Actually they began to sell it for 69€, but it immediately sold out so they raised the price. It’s still a huge bargain though, and it periodically disappears from Yoigo’s website when it sells out; the Galaxy Mini, which is also sold on prepaid from the same carrier, costs 99€ and has a far worse screen. The Iphone 3GS, which has similar specs to the Blade, costs 3 or 4 times as much off-contract.
As for the Skate: it looks gorgeous. 512MB RAM, 800 MHZ, 5mp camera, 4.3inch 800 x 480 screen, thin and light…..if it indeed comes for 200€ off-contract, I’m sold. And other manufacturers will be forced to lower the price of their shiny aluminum phones.
Anonymous
/ June 8, 2011it’s an msm7227 turbo cpu, same is in the Samsung Galaxy Ace and HTC ChaCha, Galaxy Ace not do flash
Simon
/ June 9, 2011Flash is overrated and slow in my opinion. I have it on a few devices.
David
/ June 9, 2011A lot of people find it very useful – me included.
It’s not rare to want to play a web video that uses flash, and it’s not that slow on old devices like the HD2 and Desire Z that I have, and on newer devices it’s incredibly fast!
I find it frustrating when Flash isn’t available, though on a slow device like ZTE blade, it may be best not having flash due to resource requirements.