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.