Alcatel OneTouch: The company unveiled the industry’s first phone with user interface and symmetrical design that always appear rightside up even if the phone is held upside down. The LTE-equipped Idol 3 smartphone will be the company’s first smartphone to be launched globally, including the U.S.
It will be available in 5.5- and 4.7-inch versions. The 5.5-inch model will appear first in the U.S. as an unlocked model through the company’s web store. The 4.7-inch model arrives early summer through undisclosed channels.
BlackBerry: The BlackBerry Leap is positioned as an affordable all-touch GSM/LTE smartphone. It incorporates the latest Black- Berry 10.3.1 OS and features 5-inch 720p display, dual-core 1.5GHz CPU and 2GB RAM. The company also previewed a luxury Porsche Design BlackBerry 10 device and a svelte touchscreen slider with dual-curved display. Pricing and availability weren’t announced
HTC: The One M9 flagship features a metal unibody with jewelry-grade finish, 5-inch FullHD 1080p display, Android 5.0 Lollipop OS, LTE, 64-bit octa-core processor running at 4x2GHz and 4×1.5GHz, 3GB RAM and a rear-facing 20-megapixel camera with 4K video recording.
Huawei: The second-generation Media- Pad is promoted as the industry’s slimmest 7-inch phablet at 7.28mm. It features a 7-inch 1,200 by 1,920 HD screen and 64-bit 2GHz octa-core processor. It will come in two versions: one with 2G RAM and 16GB storage in silver, and one with 3G RAM and 32GB storage in gold. The company didn’t say if the product would come to the U.S.
LG: A quartet of midtier phones will be available in 3G HSPA+21Mbps and LTE Category 4 versions. All feature Android Lollipop OS.
Microsoft: The company continued to focus on affordability with the 5-inch Lumia 640 and 5.7-inch 640 XL.
Both new models feature 1.2GHz quadcore processor, 1GB RAM, and Here maps for offline turn-by-turn navigation.
Samsung: Two Galaxy S5 successors are the Galaxy S6 and S6 edge. The latter will be the world’s first phone with a curved display running along the edges of both sides of the main display. The edge displays will display quick-access app icons and information.
Both new phones, arriving in April in the U.S., also have hardened-glass backs and metal sides to differentiate them from the allplastic S5. They also have both the WPC 1.1 and PMA 1.0 wireless-charging technologies.
Both are the first devices with Samsung Pay mobile payment system, a near-universal system because it uses both NFC and Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) technology. Compared with the S5, the new models step up to Android 5.0 Lollipop OS, quad- HD Super AMOLED 5.1-inch display, 64-bit octacore processor running at 4×2.1GHz plus 4×1.5GHz, and 3GB RAM.
