Panasonic has lifted the veil on the Eluga Power: a premium version of its previously-announced Eluga smartphone.
Earlier this month, Panasonic revealed that after abandoning the European mobile phone market six years ago, it is to return this spring with an Android smartphone called Eluga. The sleek phone has a slim frame, a 4.3-inch screen, standard Android internals and a waterproof coat.
The Eluga Power is the high-end version of that phone. It packs a five-inch, 1280x720-pixel HD touchscreen, an eight-megapixel camera on the back that shoots 1080p video (and a smaller camera on the front), and that same waterproof and dustproof promise. That means it will survive being submerged in water up to a depth of a metre for half an hour, and it's protected against dust (particles of 75 micrometers or less in diameter) for up to eight hours of permament contact.
Inside, the Eluga Power has a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 1.5GHz dual-core processor, NFC, GPS, 8GB of storage space and a microSD Slot for a further 32GB of space. Panasonic also boasts "superfast charging". You can apparently juice the phone up half way in half an hour, and get to 80 percent charge in an hour.
On the OS side, the Eluga Power runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
It's another big-screened, big camera-sporting, dual-coring Android-powered smartphone -- something of a trend at Mobile World Congress so far. Between this, HTC, Sony and Samsung, there's a lot of specification repetition on offer. When it comes to differentiation, it feels like it'll all be down to the software.
Or, we suppose, how waterproof you need a phone to be.
Release dates for the Eluga Power haven't been announced, but we'd expect a UK launch in Q1 or Q2 of 2012.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
