And may God help us all. In what is clearly a rip off of the HTC brand name, a Chinese pirate company has called its Android mobile handset offering the “HKC Pearl”. How very innovative. How very marketable. How original. How Chinese-sy and typical of the Chinese economy currently – a country where cheap knockoffs are produced with scant regard for intellectual property rights (think the Chinese Starbucks)
and which shows the Chinese people to be completely bereft of creativity and an innovative mindset. Kinda sad really.
Anywho, here’s the video of the HKC Pearl in action. About the only exciting thing here is that they claim it’s able to run Android and Windows Mobile (“WinMo”), though whether side-by-side or mutually exclusive of each other (ie. if you install Android, you can’t run WinMo, and vice versa). The video only shows the Android portion in action. Nothing exciting if you’ve seen the T-Mobile G1 in action, this one doesn’t introduce new features of the firmware talked about here.
More details, including specifications and pictures, are available on the Chinese Engadget site. No word on whether they will internationalise the operating system for sales to English speaking countries or not. No pictures of the soft/virtual keyboard in action.
[...] Part 1, if you remember, was about the Pearl running Android (along with some derogatory comments from me
), with a video and a link that contains some pretty pictures of the user interface. Engadget Chinese has posted another article that shows the Windows Mobile side of the Pearl. [...]
[...] Not many blogs reported on this device from Compulab, codenamed the exeda, which claims to be able to run either Windows Mobile, Android or Angstrom Linux (whatever that is!). Their hardware specifications apparently supports these three operating systems without the need to customise anything, which is interesting, and similar to the Chinese Android handset reported here. [...]
Nice blog. Keep up the good work.
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