By Panasonic’s looking to join the smartphone race starting in Japan early next year, according to Reuters. It’s unfamiliar territory for the technology vendor who claims they’ve always wanted to jump into the market, but unfortunately misjudged the rate at which smartphones would take off. Their approach will be similar to Samsung’s in terms of product connectivity as they already host a line of televisions, blu-ray and DVD players, and the like.
Whatever phone they’ll be using to make that first step is, we know it’ll be running Android, says mobile communications unit head Osamu Waki:
“We misjudged the speed at which smartphones would be taken up in the Japanese market,” Osamu Waki, head of the company’s mobile communications unit told a news conference. “With the rapid shift to Android, we want to catch up quickly.”
This wouldn’t be Panasonic’s first venture into phones. They’ve already had their hand in the feature phone market earlier in the decade, but pulled out due to fierce competition from Nokia, Samsung, and LG. But the smartphone market – while not new – has been reimagined and there is still a lot of room for new players to step up every day. I can’t wait to see what Panasonic has in store for everyone come Spring time.
There’s only one way to catch up quickly. 4″+ screen with Dual Processors, FFC, “4G”, 4G, and stock STOCK STOOOOOCK Android and up to date updates.
There’s only one way to catch up: make the crappiest software possible and sell it as next-gen phone at affordable prices.
What would be AWESOME is a phone that optionally comes ROOTED and the provider allowing users to be the testers of the ROMs THEY publish on their site and yes, a multi core processor and LOTS of memory. Then they should set up a place for the USERS to upload ROMs too, and ENDORSE THE WHOLE THING.
I’d switch contracts in a heartbeat.
A 3.8 inch screen with
8 megapixel & XENON flash,
Oled screen
Dual-core processor
At least 4gb of on board storage.
Tegra 2 or Tegra 3 (depending how soon they will launch this) and the very latest stock Android version. And of course awesome design and build quality (metal or something)
If they don’t do this, they shouldn’t even try. The bigger established players will crush them.
@Wolfton that would be plain awful. It’s ok to have some phones that can be rooted but it’s a major security risk and would make Android unusable for business if all phones could be rooted and equipped with custom roms.
Also custom roms may invite incompatibility.
It’s best to have both types of phones.
This wouldn’t even be their first smartphone venture – in the previous decade they put out a few Symbian smartphones (which were even more horrible than Symbian normally is). I had a Panasonic X800 for a while and it was great when it wasn’t constantly running out of memory just from system services trying to do too much (i.e. it was never great).
Make a superphone and they will sell like crazy.