G1 News

It might have been a little slow to get going in the West, but the allure of a robust, free open source platform has the Far East banging out an array of Android powered devices in the coming months leading up to Christmas.

HTC have been the standard-bearer for a while, and in addition to the phone they are launching in the UK tomorrow (widely rumoured to be the Hero), they will be bringing out 3 more devices in the second half of 2009.

The Korean contingent are coming through from Q3, with Samsung i7500 due to make an appearance (what happened to the Jet/S8000 running Android?) and three Android handsets due from LG.

With the new breed including Huawei’s glass-loving iClone and handsets from Acer and Lenovo sporting the Google-made OS, it will definitely be exciting to see what kind of niche Android carves for itself when the phones running it have to be counted on two hands…

Yes, it seems the the laptop maker has been hiding some special design skills back, as this new handset looks pretty amazing! This is an early (but working) OPhone, the product of an alliance between China Mobile and Lenovo, seemingly made purely make the rest of the planet somewhat jealous!

This phone will be one of the first ‘OPhones,’ a blanket term for the product of China Mobile creating their own mobile phone operating system, combining open source Android with China’s own 3G TD SCDMA network. ‘Why share profits with anyone, when you can just make your own phones and OS?’ seems to be China Mobile’s strategy, which was where the difficulty getting Apple’s iPhone sold in the country stemmed from.

Looks gorgeous! Those dot-matrix buttons at the base of the handset give it such a minimalist/futuristic theme!

Obviously, the bespoke operating system means that it is unlikely to see a release outside of China…boo!