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Baidu-powered Dell Streak Pro D43 gets hands-on treatment
Dell's dual-cored Streak Pro D43 has arrived in the hands of our colleagues over at Engadget Chinese. In a detailed tour of the first Baidu Yi smartphone, they've unearthed a built-in battery and perused the Super AMOLED Plus qHD display, tempered with Gorilla Glass. The casing is little thick (10.3mm) but by no means a deal-breaker, with a rubberized texture apparently helping to protect the phone if you're a little rough and ready with your devices. The Baidu platform is another Chinese interpretation of Google's feature-set, so you get the likes of email, maps, cloud services and voice input search -- in Mandarin, naturally. If you're intrigued by that Baidu base, scope out the full hands-on (and video walkthrough) over on our Sino sister site.
Dell Streak Pro D43 launched in China, where Yi shall find some Baidu love
Just as rumored and teased earlier this week, yesterday Dell unveiled the world's first Baidu Yi-powered smartphone dubbed Streak Pro D43. We won't bore you with the hardware details again (the D43's identical to its Japanese Android counterpart 101DL), but it's worth noting that this dual-core 1.5GHz, quadband HSPA phone focuses on features and services tailored for Chinese users, including some seemingly basic Mandarin voice control (no pressure on Siri just yet), contacts synchronization, Baidu Chinese input, Yi's own app store and 100GB of free cloud storage that supports multimedia upload and secure file sharing. Essentially, the Yi platform's basically just another Chinese bastardized Android OS sans Google services -- much like Alibaba's Aliyun, China Mobile's Ophone and Lenovo's LeOS; but if you already reside in China and are cool with Baidu's offering, then get a Micro SIM ready and look out for a China Unicom deal soon. %Gallery-142261%
Dell's Streak Pro 101DL to become Baidu's first Yi phone, shows up in FCC's database
We already knew that Chinese search giant Baidu's been cosying up to Dell to kick-start its very own smartphone ecosystem dubbed Yi (which means "easy" in Chinese), but so far both parties have been mum on the specifics of the hardware. Thankfully, a lucky lady -- some sort of microblogging goddess on Sina Weibo -- managed to get hold of an engineering sample and was kind enough to share some details. Eagle-eyed readers may recall that this is actually Softbank's upcoming Streak Pro 101DL Android handset, which has also conveniently just showed up in the FCC database with a V04B moniker and 1,700MHz WCDMA radio -- we've attached its FCC label diagram after the break. The specs here match what we've seen before: a 4.3-inch AMOLED 960 x 540 display, Corning glass (presumably Gorilla Glass), dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm MSM8260, 8GB of ROM and microSD expansion. For those interested, Tencent Tech has reported that we could see the launch of this phone in China as soon as tomorrow, along with a competitive, unsubsidized price tag of CN¥3,000 (about $475). Well, Yi will sure make a fun playmate for its counterpart from Alibaba -- did you know that Jack Ma once called his Aliyun OS an ugly baby? True story.
