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LAS VEGAS–Kyocera today made good on its promise to launch an Android smartphone in 2010. The Zio M6000 is the company’s first handset with the Google Android operating system and is the first U.S. smartphone we’ve seen at CTIA since i first attended the show in 2004.
Running on Android OS 1.6, the Zio offers a candy bar design with a 3.5-inch, 262,000-color touch screen. The silver-and-black design isn’t anything we haven’t seen before, but it’s nonetheless slim and attractive. Below the QVGA display are a navigation trackball, a Home button, a back key, a menu control, and a search button. For typing there’s a virtual keyboard; hopefully, the integrated accelerometer should give offer a landscape orientation across all applications.
The features holds few surprises, but it should be enough for most users. You’ll find a 3.2-megapixel camera, a video player with 30-frames-per-second playback, Wi-Fi, voice dialing, a music player, a digital compass, a full HTML browser, stereo Bluetooth, assisted-GPS, support for 3G EV-DO networks, and the usual Google applications. The handset also offers a 3.5mm headset jack and a microSD slot that can accommodate cards up to 32GB. Internal memory is capped at 512MB of shared space.
The Zio will be available in the second quarter of this year for $169-$219 before carrier subsidy. Cricket Wireless will get the phone and we hear that it will land at Sprint as well. We’ll track down the device at CTIA and give it the full photo and video treatment.
