It’s been said many times (quite often by me) that smartphones are slowly evolving into true mini-laptops. And to add a bit of fuel to that argument, the Nokia N97 is even being billed by the Finnish manufacturer as a ‘mobile multimedia computer’. Over the weekend, though, something’s popped up that brings the worlds of phones and lappies closer together: the xpPhone.
The catch? According to EngadgetMobile, it’s not really a phone, but a MID (or a Mobile Internet Device to you and me).
Still, it’s got a sim card slot in it, as well as a proper antenna, and it has call and end keys on the front, so I’m calling it a phone, and naming conventions be damned! That’s not such a stupid decision for me to make, since the xpPhone clearly seems to be some boundary-blurring device that could be a MID, or could be a phone, but probably won’t be a very good example of either.
Going against it, in terms of it being more like a phone, is the sheer size of the thing. That screen comes in at 4.8 inches from corner to corner (over half an inch bigger than the screen on the Toshiba TG01). And since the front of the phone’s a fair bit bigger than the actual screen (not to mention the fact it’s got a full QWERTY keyboard with a PC-esque number pad), the xpPhone is going to be one massive big fat biffer of a thing!
However, when judged as a MID, it fairs a bit better. There’s no word on what the processor’s running at, but given that the whole thing’s running on Windows XP, it’d better be a rather fast one, lest your xpPhone runs like a three-legged donkey. RAM ain’t bad, though, at 1Gb, and since you get 64Gb of memory, it’s on a par with a decent laptop, in terms of storage space.
The main problem, though, is the concept at the heart of it. I use XP on both my PCs, and although it can be (well, alright, is) a memory hog, the biggest problem’ll be the screen size. XP really isn’t designed to run on touchscreens that small (and in the laptop world, unlike the mobile world, 4.8 inches is tiny), so there’s every possibility that it’ll be an absolute pig to use.
Still, it’s a damnably interesting concept, and if it ever does make it into production, I’d love to have a fiddle about with one…
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