Man, Japan gets all the cool stuff. KDDI au announced recently a bunch of new Android handsets, including the HTC EVO 3D, the Motorola Photon, and this beauty made by Toshiba and Fujitsu. It has a 4.3-inch 1280 x 720 touchscreen, packs a 13 megapixel camera on the back, and is running Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread on a dual-core 1.2 GHz OMAP processor with 1 GB of RAM. If that wasn’t impressive enough, this thing is waterproof, functioning fine when submerged up to 1.5 meters for 30 minutes. There are also a few of the crazier features we never see on this side of the world, like an infrared port and digital TV tuner, along with some more standard stuff like and HDMI-out port, WiMAX connectivity, and a Wi-Fi hotspot function.
Last year, Fujitsu and Toshiba merged their mobile business, and though we haven’t seen many smartphones from them here in North America, it’s clear they’ve been busy making products for their home turf. Tablets are a bit of a different story; Fujitsu’s working on one, also in the Arrows family, for Japan, while Toshiba’s Thrive has been in stores for awhile and they’re already working on the next one.
It’s always a little demoralizing seeing how much cooler the phones are in Japan, but at least it provides a preview of what kind of tech to expect over here in a year’s time. The Toshiba-Fujitsu Arrows Z will be available on KDDI au in early November, but you can see the rest of their fall/winter lineup over here.
[via TechCrunch]