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The Consumer Electronics Show — that’s CES to you — is in full flow now in the wonderful Las Vegas. We’ve already had our heads blown off by a raft of new gadgets. Here we take a look through our favourite mobile phones of the show so far.
The Sony Xperia S was one of the earliest to catch our eye. It’s the first handset Sony has launched without the Ericsson name attached to it after the Swedish firm was swallowed whole by the Japanese giant.
The 4.3-inch screen on the Xperia S packs a superb 720×1,280-pixel resolution, which is the same as the screen on the lovely Samsung Galaxy Nexus. In our hands-on, it looked bright and vivid and sat very nicely on the black, monolothic body.
The minimalist look is broken by a transparent plastic button bar towards the bottom, which divided opinion among the CNET UK team. We’ll have to wait for a full review to decide just what we think of this design quirk.
Slim construction seems to be the Holy Grail of phones this year and nowhere is this more evident than in the Huawei Ascend P1S. With a thickness of only 6.68mm, this is possibly the skinniest blower in the world.
Huawei has somehow managed to slap a dual-core 1.5GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and Android Ice Cream Sandwich inside. Together with the 4.3-inch Super AMOLED screen, this shows that Huawei is far from the cheap and cheerful brand it once was.
There’s no word whatsoever on pricing for the P1S, but if an affordable price tag is slapped on it, Huawei may very well become a company to watch this year.
We’d normally associate Lenovo with affordable laptops, but it’s stepping out into the smart phone world, hand-in-hand with Intel. The K800 is the first phone we’ve seen packing Intel’s latest Atom chips for phones and tablets.
At 10mm thick, it’s not as slim as many models on the market. But it is packing a 720p-resolution 4.5-inch screen and we’re hoping that some of the extra girth is taken up by a more potent battery. The K800 is sadly not running the latest version of Android, but instead uses 2.3 Gingerbread. It’s a heavily modified version though so it’s likely that you won’t be able to tell much difference.
The Intel Atom chip should make operation extremely nippy and we’re very much looking forward to finding out what this new breed of mobile processors can offer.
If making calls in the bath is high on your agenda then you should check out the latest kit from Fujitsu. The F07D is a slim, Android 2.3 Gingerbread-running smart phone with a 1.4GHz processor under the hood. Best of all, it’s waterproof to a depth of 1.5 metres so feel free to skim it across a shallow pond.
The F01D is a 10.1-inch tablet running Android 3.2 Honeycomb that’s also waterproof. It’s ideal for browsing the web and checking your email in the shower. Not that we’ve ever felt the need to do that.
We’ve also been introduced to the Nokia Lumia 900 over at CES this year. The 900 is the bigger brother of the Lumia 800 we were so fond of last year, featuring a larger 4.3-inch screen. It’s also packing LTE technology, which means that it’s going to be US-only for the time being. Keep your fingers crossed for a UK release soon.
Make sure to keep your eye on our dedicated CES site for all the latest from Las Vegas and be sure to tell us what your favourite gems are from the show in the comments below, or over on our totally awesome Facebook page.
