By What? A trend of late manufacturers using Android to get them into the mobile game is starting to form? Shocker! Just a couple of days removed from Panasonic expressing their plans to re-enter the mobile market in early 2011 with Android driving their smartphone line, NEC Casio Mobile (which includes well-known Hitachi) is looking to do the same.
CEO Yamasaki says that they hope to sell 6 million smartphones worldwide by 2012 with the majority (60% coming from regions outside of Japan. 6 million is a big number for a company who’s not necessarily known for providing an exhilarating line of products across the board, but perhaps that’s what they’ll be bringing to the table: more cheap Androids to capture the interests of smartphone newbs and the budget-conscious consumers.
[Keitai Watch via MobileCrunch]
Sweet.
Casio makes awesome phones. My Gz’One is still going strong after 4+ years and numerous falls, dunkings, and other assorted assaults including one accidental drop off my 5 story building onto concrete with not even the battery popping off. They’re one of the few manufacturers who I think might bring something truly different to Android and I’m looking forward to what it might be.
Most of these Japanese latecomers to the Android scene already have sizeable mobile divisions catering to the Japanese market what Android is doing is providing them with an opportunity to enter or in some cases reenter the global market an I for one celebrate it.
Most of these Japanese manufacturers have made feature-phones of exceptional quality with smartphone-level hardware for many years now my old Panasonic that I picked up in the summer of 2008 has a wonderful 854×480 display and a great 5megapixel camera, both easily bests the equivalent components in my current Acer Liquid.
Anyway, my point is that we can look forward to a barrage of high quality handsets from the likes of Sharp, Panasonic, Toshiba, Fujitsu, NEC, Casio, Kyocera and Hitachi. Competition drives innovation so yay for that. :)
This is a good sign for Android…
Id love to see a Fujitsu Cell phone. I can only imagine what they would make!
Hopefully one of these manufacturers will set themselves apart by giving us vanilla android instead of these stupid subpar ui’s everyone else is doing.
1/2 these guys are right in there with the manufacturing of the components, now just stick with vanilla android and I’ll be a happy customer :)
I believe you missed a parenthesis at the end of the paragraph. :)