The X1 further blurs the lines between smartphones and tablets
As smartphones grow and tablets shrink, Chinese manufacturer Huawei has claimed there is now “no difference between tablets and smartphones.”
With the phablets sector, kicked off by the predecessors to the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, having hit new heights over the last 12 months, Huawei has claimed the lines between smartphones and tablets are now blurred beyond recognition.
“The screens are getting bigger and bigger so there is now no difference between pad and smartphone,” Shao Yang, Huawei’s Chief Marketing Officer said speaking with TrustedReviews.
Highlighting Yang’s belief that smartphones and tablets are becoming one and the same, last week Huawei officially unveiled the Huawei MediaPad X1, a 7-inch tablet with the ability to make calls and be used as a smartphone outright.
Discussing how the two defined sectors are merging into one, slightly confused space, Yang stated: “Even though consumers want a big screen, they want a device that is holdable and pocketable.”
He added: “Even if consumers don’t think this is a phone, they think it is necessary that it can make a phone call. The phone call is a bonus to them.”
As well as the ability to make calls, Yang has suggested that the move to oversized smartphones has been pushed by the need to incorporate larger batteries.
“Users still want to have a big battery because with LTE the power consumption is still very, very high,” he told us. “In some countries we have found that some iPhone 5S users by 3pm can’t use their phone.”
As well as boasting a 7-inch, 1920 x 1200 pixel display and 4G, LTE connectivity options, the Huawei MediaPad X1 runs a 1.6GHz quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage expandable via microSD.
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