Lenovo breaks price barriers with the upcoming S899T model smartphone

The land of China and the Lenovo company in particular are coming out with a rather large yet cheap smartphone. They are calling it the Lephone S899T and its going to run Android. The work they are doing will bring a super low price point to smartphones. It will only cost 1,299 yuan which is just above $200 dollars at the going exchange rate.

The screen on the Lenovo Lephone S899T is large. It is nearly as large as the Samsung Note. It will be sporting four and a half inches of digital real estate. Lenovo is usually known for making quality products, but the screen on the S899T is not as clear as some would like. It has 960 by 540 pixels of resolution, which may make for some frequent "pinching and zooming" on small text. The handset is not going to have a manual keyboard, so all emailing and other messages will be typed out on the virtual keyboard. The lack of a keyboard means the smartphone will be able to keep a savvy profile. It will be measuring 9.9 millimeters ( .389 of an inch ) in thickness.

What is going to be lurking on the inside of the Lenovo Lephone S899T? It will have a dual core ARM processor. It is an ARM Cortex A9. This is similar to the Exynos chips that are created by Samsung. The graphics will be handled by a Mali 400 GPU ( Graphical Processing Unit ). The camera and Wi-Fi specifications are not yet known, since this smartphone is so new.

What is known is that the Lenovo Lephone will be running the latest Android mobile operating system, version 4.0. Ice Cream Sandwich, as it is known, will be using the dual core processor to zip through the menus and programs. The browser in the 4.0 version is said to be up to 220 percent faster than the 2.3 version. The newer version also does not require external buttons for completely virtual operation. The bad news is that not much progress has been made to secure the Android platform. Just this week it was reported that malware infected Android smartphones were being hijacked to buy things online using stolen credit cards.

No formal release date is given for the Lenovo Lephone S899T, but it is expected to be arriving in China in June or July. It has a smaller sibling that is less powerful coming out as well in the coming months. The less powerful model should come with an even lower price than the S899T. There is no word on if or when they will be coming to Western shores.