Focus groups are the bane of people who genuinely want to create something new. There’s a reason Apple doesn’t use them and why everyone quotes Henry Ford as saying that if he asked his customers what they wanted, they’d say a faster horse. Still, that hasn’t stopped Casio and Verizon from holding a focus group to see what people thought of some as yet to be released devices. One of the people at said focus group was a gadget nerd and he told the folks at Droid Life what he saw. Let’s start with the flagship device, an Android Ice Cream Sandwich smartphone with a screen that uses Super AMOLED technology and measures between 4.5 inches and 4.7 inches across. It’s less than 8 mm thick, has a quad core processor, NFC, 4G LTE, 8 megapixel rear camera, 2 megapixel forward camera, and a 2,000 mAh battery. Sound tempting? We’re practically drooling on our laptops here. Three other devices were also shown: some clamshells, a ruggedized version of the previously mentioned super phone, and a 5 inch phone that was actually a dummy unit and not a working device.
The big question is when are we actually going to be able to buy these devices and how much will they cost? Looking at our crystal ball, we’re going to say that these Casio smartphones will be announced at CTIA in May of this year and will hit the market during the summer time, if not then most definitely the back to school season. Why CTIA in May? Because yesterday we heard that the UK isn’t going to get the newly updated quad core Transformer Prime until June, so we’re thinking it’s an issue related to NVIDIA’s end, and NVIDIA is the only company making quad core chips, so … put two and two together and you get late Q2 2011.
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[Image Credit: YouTube]