You may haven’t heard of Umeox Mobile before and I don’t blame you. It is a Shenzhen, China-based ODM (Original Design Manufacturer) which rarely sells its products in the Western hemisphere.
The company has teamed up with Dutch company Intivation to launch a solar-powered Android smartphone called Umeox Apollo. As you can imagine — and see from the image above — this baby comes with a solar panel on the back, which [panel] is made using Intivation’s SunBoost3 Smart Cell solar module that works even in low-light conditions.
Aside from that, Umeox Apollo is a pretty standard mid-range Android smartphone with a 3.2-inch HVGA touchscreen, 3-megapixel camera, FM radio, 512MB of RAM, Bluetooth, HSDPA, WiFi and so on. In addition, it comes with a rugged casing that apparently makes sure the Apollo “will last, at work AND play.”
Now I can’t help but wonder which of the major handset manufacturers will jump on-board and make its own solar-powered smartphone. We know Samsung had that Blue Earth all-touchscreen feature phone, which seemed pretty decent at the time it was announced. As a matter of fact, by simply adding a more powerful processor inside the Blue Earth could prove sufficient… or not. What do you say?