Smart to offer affordable Ideos Android smartphones

Smart Communications will soon be offering Huawei Ideos, considered the world's first affordable Android smartphone.

In a statement on Jan. 26, Smart said it is "expected to offer Ideos within the P5,000-P6,000 price range for prepaid, and to bundle it with a monthly plan as low as P500 for postpaid."

When Huawei, the Chinese giant telco firm behind the Ideos, launched the U8150 model last December 2010, the cheapest handset was reportedly within the P8,800 to P9,500 range, just below Samsung Galaxy 5's retail price then at P10,500, according to technology blogger Yugatech.

Yugatech described his Ideos sample phone as one with "a 2.8inch TFT Capacitive touchscreen, a 3.2Megapixel camera and a 1200mAh battery, and an internal memory of 256MB RAM + 512MB NAND. It also supports voice dialing, voice navigation and the ability to run apps from the SD card. Ideos U8150 is equipped with 528mhz processor. Huawei’s Ideos comes in four different colors – black, yellow, blue and purple."

The name “IDEOS” comes from “ID” which means Industrial Design-centric hardware platform, and “OS” represents the operating system as the core software platform and “E” symbolizes evolution according to Huawei.

Ideos is powered by the Android 2.2 operating system and can be customized with communication, entertainment, productivity and gaming applications.

Smart said that by offering Ideos, it hopes to "strengthen its leadership in this category by completing its range of Smartphones, from high-end to the mass-market handsets."

"Mobile Internet usage in the Philippines has been growing steadily and is now poised to take off. We will now take it to next level with Smartphones that are affordable to a broader market. This is in line with our vision of 'Internet for all'," said Orlando B. Vea, Smart's chief wireless adviser.