Ever since the Nokia N-gage, you would be hard-pressed to remember any gaming-centered smartphone of note. That’s because these things never really gained traction in the market. Smartphones were smartphones, and mobile gaming consoles like the PS Vita and the Nintendo DS were totally another thing, and never the twain shall meet. Apparently, Snail Mobile did not get the memo.
Snail Mobile – a China-based company who focuses on mobile gaming – acquired another Chinese company called iReadyGo, who had a history of making Android-powered gaming handheld devices. At the Mobile World Congress in Shanghai, Snail Mobile showed people the product of this merger – the i7 gaming smartphone. See it below in all its handheld console glory.
Make no mistake, the i7 is an Android smartphone – with a FullHD (1080p) display powered by a deca-core MediaTek Helio X20 supported by 6GB RAM and 64GB internal storage, so it is a pretty well-specced phone at that. But for your gaming, there’s also a D-pad and a joystick on one side when you hold it like a gaming console, and a secondary joystick with the necessary gaming buttons on the other side. It even has left and right trigger buttons up top.
If used as a phone, the device runs on Android and has a 16MP/5MP camera combo. There’s a USB-C port for charging, although there’s no mention of quick charging capabilities to charge the ginormous 6,000mAh removable battery. The price point is pegged around USD$280, although Snail Mobile has plans of bringing this product to the global market with a more robust variant (8GB RAM, 128GB storage) priced at USD$295.
SOURCE: Engadget
“Ever since the Nokia N-gage, you would be hard-pressed to remember any gaming-centered smartphone of note”
You know the Xperia Play is a thing, right?
Reread their statement. “You’d be hard-pressed to remember any gaming-centered smartphone of note.”.
Xperia Play didn’t make anywhere near the splash the N-Gage had made…more for infamous reasons than anything. The XP is/was horrible, both in build quality and pertaining to its phone qualities. I had one, it was sad at best.
The specs definitely sound good, but how good we’ll it be the long run? And it definitely looks a lot like the psp