back to article Sharp unwraps 'world first' Intel Atom phone

Chip giant Intel doesn't reckon its Atom chip family will be ready for mobile phones until 2009-2010, but that hasn't stopped Japanese carrier Willcom punting an Atom-based handset - the first if its kind, the company claimed. Sharp Willcom D4 The D4: made by Sharp, sold by Willcom, powered by Intel The Sharp-made D4 uses …

COMMENTS

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  1. Giles Jones Gold badge

    Phone?

    This isn't a phone, it's a computer with a built in phone.

    Vista is a poor choice for such a device, it barely runs well on full desktop hardware, never mind on UMPC type phone.

  2. Andy Tyzack

    agreed@giles

    windows vista is a lemon, behold the HTC Shift,

    long live XP

  3. Paul

    Hack?

    if someone posts a decent hack for it to run ANYTHING other than Vista I would buy one.

  4. Torben Mogensen

    Indeed

    I agree with Giles. I have always found over-size smartphones just the opposite of smart: They are unhandy to hold to your ear, and if you want to jot down an appointment, you need to take the phone down from your ear while yo do it. Of course, you can have a headset connected to the phone, but then why not have the headset be the phone and have your appointment calender as a separate device.

  5. Jamie
    Linux

    Com'on

    Anyone else out there notice that fact that this thing is almost as big as the phones that were around in the 80's.

    That was issue one, issue two is to get rid of the Windows OS altogether and put a version of Linux on it. Then the 40GB HDD will have tons of left over space.

  6. Ian K
    Coat

    @Giles Jones

    You put a few too many words on the end of your second paragraph; a simple:

    Vista is a poor choice.

    ...would have been fine. Why narrow it down to phones?

    Mine's the one with a S60-based Nokia in the pocket.

  7. Steven Hewittt

    Great

    Vista runs fine on a 1Ghz with 512Mb as long as you don't have 400 3rd party apps loading at startup - which the majority of OEM laptops/desktops have.

    My media centre (Vista Ult with Office 2007) is some archaic relic from about 6 years ago. 512Mb RAM and some crappy Athlon 1500+ (1.3Ghz) and some dirt cheap graphics from about a year ago. (£30). Runs fine. Have Aero on, do my email, word processing and web browsing on it fine. Also do a bit of BitTorrent but mainly use it for Media Centre. Better than any other freeview dedicated box I've come across.

    Considering that this device has a better spec than than my media centre box - which runs fine - I'd pretty confident that it's going to run without a problem.

  8. andy gibson

    SHARP?

    I remember them, but not seen them around for years. What have they been up to?

  9. Ash
    Thumb Down

    That's a phone?!

    Jeez, it's 8 inches wide! Who in their right mind would hold that up to their face? Or is it meant to sit in the pocket and a headset be used?

    Unless it comes with a backpack, that would DEFINATELY never leave the house. Half a kilogram? Good luck making a call on that for any longer than 45 seconds.

  10. Frank Bough
    Happy

    andy

    ...they've been making trillions of LCD televisions. Good ones, too.

  11. jai

    retro styling?

    reminds me of those 80's house-brick sized "mobile" phones

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Niiiiiiiice

    I don't think that Jonathan Ive will be losing any sleep over this.

  13. Jack

    @andy gibson

    I believe they have been mainly making lcd panels and televisions, although i do occasionally see the odd person (arguably very odd person) with a sharp mobile.

  14. Stu
    Coat

    @Andy Gibson

    Sharp have obviously been brown-nosing Intel's Exec's to pull out a fast, high-spec phone that looks to be the same size as my old Atari Portfolio...

    Let's see John Connor hack an ATM without Vista crashing =)

    (Mine's the one at the back with the Atari logo, thanks!)

  15. Mad Hacker
    Thumb Down

    More overpriced than an iPhone

    $1275 USD????

    That's more than double an iPhone which most people complain is way overpriced.

    And it's friggin' huge man! Who would carry that thing?

    I think the Atari Portfolio was smaller than that in 1989 (of course it didn't include a phone.)

    What a load. If anything it makes me want an iPhone even more.

  16. Anne van der Bom
    Happy

    @ash

    It is rumoured that the governor of California can make calls longer than a minute on this phone, so stop whining.

  17. PJ Quinn
    Gates Horns

    LAF

    Zack Morris would be proud.

  18. Andrew Burgess

    Hard drive VS flash

    A hard drive and it's power consumption, weight, noise and low reliability?

    How 90's.

    32G flash is mainstream now on a half inch chip for $70 retail so would add a few tens of dollars to the cost (minus the hard disk). Not fast enough? Put two 16G in parallel -- probably cheaper but more real estate.

  19. Rick Brasche

    does it come with a chiropractor?

    you're gonna need it holding that monster up to your ear for any length of time. Headset mandatory to keep from causing physical strain, not to mention the blind spot.

    It'd be even funnier to see than the N-gage 'side talkin'"

  20. Daniel B.
    Thumb Down

    They won it.

    I didn't think someone would come up with a worse-sized idea of a phone than the iPhone.

    Now they didn't just do that, but they slapped on Vista inside. Yes, Vista, instead of (at least) Windows Mobile, which is for ... you know... MOBILE phones.

    I already think of my Blackberry Curve of being too large for a mobile standards, but it seems small in comparison to this thing. Bad idea, I think even the "PSP as a phone" idea would look better than this.

    And at 1275 USD I might be buying an acutal LAPTOP. One that doesn't have Vista installed, preferably ;)

  21. Paul

    nokia tablets and zaurus have nothing to fear

    this isn't a handheld computer like the nokia tablets or the zaurus or even windowsMobiles like the HTC universal.

    no, this is a new breed of device, the portable slab, or sub-MID.

    nice spec, shame about the weight, size, and the OS!

  22. Steve Evans

    Oh dear...

    Another gutsy little CPU and nice device dragged to a screaming halt by a huge bloated OS.

    You only have to look at the Eee to see what you can do with a nice light OS, for a fraction of the price. No hard drive required!

    Now if only the made an Eee phone....

  23. Stan

    Zaurus replacement

    Looks like they have come up with the zaurus replacement. Sure, it's a communications brick and its running ME2 but that's all going to make it cheaper for me when I replace my SL1000 in a year or two :) Phone, bluetooth, a bigger screen and a lot more powerfull, good stuff. No-one has mentioned battery life though, could be half that bulky brick of a phone is li-ion cells. and it still needs plugged in twice a day if you actually use it as a PDA/PC/mini laptop thing.

    cheers

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