NTT DoCoMo has recently announced what some may call a Frankensteinian perversion among smartphones; the Fujitsu LOOX F-07C is a landscape slider with 4-inch 1024 x 600 display (!), HDMI-out, 5 megapixel camera, 1 GB of RAM, 1.2 GHz processor, and 32 GB of storage. The real kicker? It dual-boots into Symbian or the desktop Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit OS. Although the Windows layout has been altered to be more finger-friendly, there’s a trackball included next to the QWERTY keyboard for fine cursor movement. On the downside, you’ll only get 2 hours of battery life running Windows, but oh what a magical two hours they would be.
This isn’t the firs time mobile and desktop operating systems have brushed up against one another; dual-booting Android and Windows is the main trick Viewsonic is employing in one of their tablets, though that makes a bit more sense than this Fujitsu dealie given the form factor. Still, UMPCs have been around for awhile, so it’s only natural that there are some transitionary products that appeals to those who have basically been doing smartphone-style tasks for years before the rest of us. That two hours of battery life is unfortunate, but the fact that it can even run big-boy Windows is impressive. Besides, if you’ve got a wall-charger or a spare battery, it’s not much of an issue.
For those interested and in the neighbourhood, the Fujitsu F-07C launches in Japan in June or July for 70,000 Yen ($US 860). Here’s a hands-on video from Akihabara.
[via Engadget]