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Kyocera Honey Bee, world’s fastest smartphone is not easy on the eyes
Japan is a country with its own cultures, its own practices and its own little bubble but they are in no way strange. The individuality about them is actually something to admire. The Kyocera Honey Bee however, seems to draw many negative comments regarding its gaudy and bright colours and as one writer from IntoMobile says, “…is quite honestly the most offensive looking device on the face of the planet.”
Its appearance aside, the reason we have decided to put the limelight on this device although it will never leave the island of Japan is because the phone dubbed “Honey Bee” has a Renesas APE5R. Renesas are a tiny system on chip (SoC) vendor which makes platforms that like the phone will never leave Japan.
Like most SoC vendors, they take processors from ARM and other firms and then stick them on a slab of silicone. The APE5R has two ARM Cortex A9 processors clocked at 1.2GHz, and more impressively, a pair of PowerVR SGX543 GPUs. That would be the same GPU used in the Apple A5. The iPad 2’s A5 clocked in at 1GHz while the iPhone 4S has an A5 which clocked in at 800MHz which makes the Renesas APE5R at 1.2 GHz the fastest SoC on the market. Of course we have the Samsung 1.4GHz Exynos that is on the Galaxy Note but that particular chip uses an ARM Mali-400 GPU which is fast but nowhere near as fast as the PowerVR SGX543.
The Fairphone 2 was first unveiled in June earlier this year, where this particular handset carried a modular design while featuring majority of its components that have been sourced from conflict-free mines. It seems that this particular handset that you can purchase with a clear conscience has begun to ship to those who happen to live across Europe.
Fairphone announced in a blog post, “It’s been almost two years in the making, and some of the earliest buyers have been patiently waiting since July to receive their new phones. As community manager, I want to personally welcome the new batch of Fairphone owners to our community.” The initial 1,000 units are tipped to ship this month, before the other pre-orders follow in January 2016.
In terms of hardware specifications, the Fairphone 2 will run on a Snapdragon 801 chipset, has a 5″ 1080p screen with Gorilla Glass 3 protection, 2GB of RAM, an 8MP camera, with Android 5.1 Lollipop in tow. It will be a dual SIM capable handset with a microSD memory card slot and plays nice with 4G LTE networks, retailing for approximately €525 a pop.
It looks like the upcoming flagship model from Xiaomi will feature NFC support, at least based on a document that was released by China UnionPay. Just in case you are scratching your head and wondering who China UnionPay is, they happen to be the only domestic payment gateway supplier and card organization, and hence, to see them offer detailed support concerning the newly released NFC-based payment system points to the very real possibility of the upcoming Xiaomi Mi 5 featuring NFC capability.
After all, the Xiaomi Mi 3 was also mentioned on the list, which so happens to feature NFC, and there is no mention of the Xiaomi Mi 4 which does not come with NFC. Still, such a new payment system would be the ideal tool to see the reintroduction of NFC to the flagship model.
OnePlus did make an announcement in the previous month that the Ceramic variant of the OnePlus X will be released on November 24. True to their word, they did exactly that – although only a pitiful number of units were made available, and not only that, this was through a charity auction. Thankfully for the rest of the masses who are on the lookout for this device, it has gone on sale officially already.
Needless to say, this particular variant is available only by an invitation, although do bear in mind that standard OnePlus X invites are not good here – you will still need to snag yourself a specific Ceramic variant invite before you make a purchase. OnePlus is also on the lookout to offer additional methods of picking up this smartphone, although no further details were revealed.
The OnePlus X Ceramic will be available only in select markets, where among them include Europe, India, and Hong Kong. To date, we do know that OnePlus had made only 10,000 units of the handset available. A case of the early bird getting the proverbial worm here?