Else Emblaze Hands-on | Retro Interface

 

The Else Emblaze hardware, built by Sharp:

The Else Emblaze, aside from being one of the first phones to use Access' Linux Platform v3.0 OS, is a 3.47-inch 480x854 slab of handset, with an OMAP 3430 processor, 16GB of internal memory, a five-megapixel camera, A-GPS, and 3.5mm headphone jack.

It's more striking than your typical touchscreen smartphone slab on account of its blue illuminated side buttons and touchscreen icon tray, which some might find superfluous. If you carried this this around, people would ask about it.

A smartphone is only as good as its software, and that's where the Else's greatest strengths and potential weaknesses lie. The "menu" system, though Else would rather not use that word, is a series of concentric levels and sublevels, which you can theoretically navigate with one thumb. I say theoretically out of instinctive skepticism, but I have tried it, and it does work—the learning curve is actually very slight, and finding your way around the phone's basic functions is something I could do instantly. It makes sense, it's smart, and the concept is applied evenly throughout the OS. Else won't go any further than to say they're "optimistic" about US carrier prospects, but that could mean a lot of things. And it's hard to imagine a little upstart like this standing much of a chance against giants like Google and Apple, who don't just have the basics nailed down, but an entire ecosystem of apps to lean on. But maybe calling this thing a smartphone is a misnomer: in a way, it's like the ultimate featurephone; one that can do most of the stuff an app-ified smartphone can do, in a genuinely new way.

via Gizmodo

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