Mobile Phone Blog:

Hmm, now here’s an intriguing story for a bank holiday Monday, fresh from the pages of WMPoweruser. It’s a post about an upcoming phone from China called the Sunno S880. We’ll set aside the fact that it’s an absolute dead ringer for the Sony Ericsson Satio, and is therefore a clone of it, for a moment (and I don’t just mean it looks similar… I mean that, apart from the back panel, it looks bleedin’ identical), because what’s rather interesting is the operating system it runs on. Or, rather, operating systems, plural.

Y’see, what we’ve got here is a mobile phone that will do something PCs have been capable of for ages: dual-booting.

Or, in other words, when you turn the phone on, you can pick whether it boots up with Windows Mobile or Android. That leads to some rather intriguing possibilities, such as the Sunno S880 being both a work phone (with WinMo features like Outlook) and a personal phone (with stuff like Pacman), in one device.

In essence, that’s a bit like the concept behind the Nokia E71 (with its work and play modes), but taken to extremes, as when you switch from one mode to the next, you switch between different OSes, and you change what your phone looks, feels and runs like entirely.

Hmmm, how very intriguing. Oh, and of course, the phone looks rather nice (well it would, wouldn’t it… it is a clone of the Sony Ericsson Satio, after all). The camera looks decent, too, coming in at 8 megapixels, and it’s got a really rather speedy processor, running at 806MHz. Oh, and WiFi and GPS, obviously.

I wouldn’t get one, though. With clone-phones, you’re notoriously taking your life (well, your wallet… none of them have actively tried to kill users, yet) in your own hands. If it goes wrong, where exactly to you take it to get it fixed? Probably Outer Mongolia or somewhere like that. However, on the plus side, now dual-booting has been done by one phone, there’s the potential to see it on actual proper phones in the future. Which would be a cool thing.

So, in conclusion, what we’ve got here is a Chinese clone of a Swedish/Japanese-made Symbian-powered phone, which doesn’t run Symbian, but instead runs Windows Mobile and Android.

If that’s not enough to induce schizophrenia in even the strongest minds, I don’t know what is…

Sunno S880 – pioneer of a new way of doing things with mobile phones, or cheap rip-off that’ll explode when you look at it funny? Leave us a comment and have your say!