i-mate roadmap reveals slick quad-band communicator
Media phone too
What has smart-phone seller i-mate got on its product roadmap for the coming months? According to a copy of what's said to the supplier's near-term release schedule, it has a number of interesting handsets in the pipeline, including a slick, black clamshell communicator, the K-Jar.
The details come via Arabic-language site CE4Arab.com, subsequently relayed by Italian site NewsMobile. Closed, the K-Jar is a shiny black 2001-esque slab with a 93 x 39 pixel colour OLED mini-display and call make and break buttons on one side, and a two megapixel camera on the other. Opening the phone reveals a QWERTY keyboard and a 2.8in, 65,536-colour display.
The best part: the big screen appears to fold right round to turn the K-Jar into a traditional tablet-style PDA phone, complete with five-way navigator plus Windows Mobile Start menu, soft-menu, and call make and break buttons.
Internally, it's said to contain a 200MHz Texas Instruments OMAP 850 processor, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 1.2, a quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE cellular radio, 64MB of RAM, 128MB of Flash ROM and a MiniSD slot.
The SP Jam is a candybar phone with a big, 2.8in, 262,144-colour display. It's clearly pitched as a media phone: the SP Jam is said to incorporate a TV-out port and has 256MB of Flash on board, half for the usual Windows Mobile 128MB system ROM and the rest for storage, though a MiniSD slot provides a way to add more. The handset has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0 on board, the latter with A2DP wireless stereo support. It has a two megapixel camera.
The phone's powered by a Freescale processor, but it's unclear whether the chip's clocked to 350MHz or 532MHz. The handset also has GPS on board.
Finally, i-mate appears to be preparing another member of the JAQ BlackBerry-like series, a quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE handset with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 1.2 and - the unique selling point - integrated GPS.
The JAQ4 and the SP Jam are due to ship in February 2007, according to a leaked roadmap slide. The K-Jar is due sooner: later this month, if the slide's to be believed. ®
