Jørgen Sundgot sneaks a peek of Panasonic's X700 successor in Cannes: meet the super-slim, megapixel-enabled X800 smartphone.
Topping the Panasonic X700 is something that's hard to do. After all, Panasonic's first - and, until now, only - smartphone still remains one of the smallest smartphones in existence a year after its unveiling. With the X800, unveiled today at the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, France, the handset maker has managed to improve on an already excellent recipe, creating the world's slimmest smartphone to date.
 | | Panasonic X800 |
To be available in select Asian markets next month, the X800 is extremely sleek with a thickness of only 17 mm, in which Panasonic has integrated a somewhat outdated 0.3 MP camera capable of taking both stills and recording video. A miniSD card expansion slot is provided for memory expansion, and the device will also come with QuickOffice software providing compatibility with Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint and Word documents.
Not only sleek but also light, the X800 offers a more up-to-date design than the X700, and despite not running the final version of its firmware proved snappy during my short hands-on session. Pictures taken with the camera appeared to be of relatively high quality - comparatively speaking - and the viewfinder refresh rate was also comfortable.
 | | Panasonic X800 |
Despite being close to flush with the surface of the phone, the X800's keypad offered comfortable tactile feedback. Another positive trait would be the crisp, clear and unusually bright screen, which offers 24-bit colour depth and as such is capable of drawing from a palette of up to 16 million colours.
The only possible hardware drawback of the X800 is that it's a tad long and unwieldy when opened, but not bothersomely so - and besides, I found it refreshing using a phone which doesn't invoke the urge to move the device back and forth between the ear and mouth when having a conversation.
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Archive