Designed as an Apple iPhone competitor, Toshiba's new TG01 smartphone features Qualcomm's Snapdragon platform and a 4.1-inch touchscreen display. Toshiba is now one of several PC vendors to jump into the smartphone market. At the 2009 Mobile World Congress, Acer also released a number of new smartphone designs - that company's first foray into the mobile phone space - and Dell is still rumored to have its own smartphone in the works.
Acer isn't the only PC maker rolling out a Microsoft Windows Mobile-enabled
smartphone this week: In a bid to compete in a market dominated by BlackBerry and
Apple's iPhone,
Toshiba has announced a multimedia-friendly smartphone, the
TG01.
Due to roll out
in Europe this summer, the Toshiba TG01 features a 4.1-inch-wide VGA touchscreen
display, and will be one of the first mobile devices to utilize Qualcomm's
Snapdragon
platform, providing users with a 1GHz Scorpion processor, as well as Wi-Fi
technology and 3G connectivity.
The Toshiba
handset will run Windows Mobile 6.1. Its 0.38-inch thickness makes it a sleek
touchscreen-centric competitor to both the Apple iPhone 3G and RIM's BlackBerry
Storm.
Adding an
additional 32 GB of storage to the Toshiba TG01 smartphone will be possible via
an AmicroSD memory card slot.
PC makers have
recently been making aggressive moves into the smartphone arena. At the
2009
Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Acer announced that it
expected smartphones to provide up to 10 percent of the company's
revenue by 2012.
"We are
extremely serious entering this space," Aymar de Lencquesaing, the head of
Acer's smartphone business, told a news conference in Barcelona, according to
Reuters. "We genuinely believe that we can be actually one of the top five. Over
time I hope we can be better than top five."
Dell,
along with Garmin and Asus, have either rolled out their own smartphones, or
are heavily rumored to do so during the Mobile World Congress, which began on
Feb. 16.
Leaping into the
smartphone market with both feet could also play into these companies'
enterprise strategy.
"If you're Dell
and approaching an enterprise customer, and they ask, -What do you have in
phones?' - then they'll have that in order to complete that bid," said Roger
Kay, an analyst with Endpoint Technologies Associates. "It becomes an extension
of their overall computing platform, and that might justify their entry into the
smartphone market."
Experts believe
that the mobile-device market will become an increasingly valuable one for PC
makers, as more people use their handhelds to perform functions traditionally
reserved for desktops or laptops.
"I think there
may be a defensive aspect to this," added Kay. "If you expected people to do
more computing on a small device, you would want to enter that market. The
comfort and ease of input, and amount of screen real estate on output, may be
limiting factors for some, but for a lot of people it's not
limiting."
No pricing for
the TG01 has been released as yet. Toshiba also did not announce when and if the
new smartphone would land in the North American market.
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