CES 2010
Lenovo today introduced its first Android phone for global markets. It's called "Lephone", which may sound French, but is actually a play on the Chinese word for "happy", and of course on the company's name.
It's a high-spec phone in some ways, such as the 3.7-inch, 400x800-pixel display and 1 GHz Snapdragon processor. It's not all top-end, though, as the camera is only 3-megapixel. Perhaps that's a compromise made to achieve the thin profile, which is indeed quite thin at 12mm. The Lephone also includes a 3.5mm audio jack.
The Lephone has a sexy and solid-feeling design. Instead of a set of buttons below the display, there's a capacitive touch area. We only noticed a home key that required two presses to activate, but supposedly it also supports gestures, like a Palm webOS phone. In fact, the home key is not usually lit, and it's invisible when dark, copying one of the more questionable design decisions of the Palm Pixi.
The Lephone runs Google's Android OS, although Lenovo reps we spoke to couldn't tell us which version of Android. The interface has been very heavily customized. Instead of the usual widget-based home screen, the Lephone's default home screen is a "communication" screen, dominated by five large icons, for contacts, phone, email, messaging, and IM. Time and weather are also shown, at the top.
From the default home screen, an icon at the bottom will take you to a more standard set of Android widget screens. Lenovo has preloaded Lephone with a handful of widgets, all of which are full-screen. The Lenovo widgets remind us of a cross between HTC TouchFlo and LG's S-Class interfaces.
The main app menu is summoned by way of a small (almost too small) button at the top-right of the screen. Unlike most Android phones which have one big scrolling list of apps, the Lephone instead displays app icons on pages that you swipe between, like on the iPhone.
Other aspects of the interface are more like standard Android, including the familiar pull-down notification panel, for example.
There's a proprietary 9-pin jack on the side, which connects to a unique clip-on keyboard accessory. The keyboard has a rather sexy split-QWERTY key layout with a d-pad in the center. It was quite roomy and perfectly nice to type on. You can leave the Lephone and keyboard attached and close it like a sideways-clamshell phone, although it's rather bulky that way. It's a shame they couldn't make the keyboard accessory thinner, or it might be worth leaving attached.
Lenovo claims they plan to bring the Lephone to markets all over the world, starting around March or April. They won't confirm which markets will be first, but China seems likely, based on hints in the presentation, plus the Chinese characters on many screens of the demo units.
In spite of the silly-sounding name, Lephone looks and feels like a quality device. We have doubts the Lephone will come to the US this year, but it's a promising start for Lenovo.
Here's a video tour of the Lephone:
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