NextSeries
Latest
Panasonic: Eluga means 'Elegant, user-orientated gateway,' not a cry of distress
No, it's not the noise people make when they've eaten too much caviar. Panasonic's revealed the reasoning behind calling its long-heralded smartphone Eluga -- apparently it stands for "ELegant, User-orientated GatewAy." The company's also revealed a few more specs and tidbits following on from yesterday's rather sketchy announcement. You'll find an 8-megapixel camera sitting flush to that 7.8mm body, NFC and an "eco mode" that will shut down non-essential features when you're nursing your nearly-empty battery. That 1.0GHz TI OMAP processor we revealed to you yesterday will be joined by 8GB storage, WiFi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR. You'll buy the phone with Gingerbread 2.3.5 installed, with ICS promised to arrive "from June," by which point you'll have probably learned how to pronounce the name without looking ill.
Panasonic's new Eluga smartphone: pretty phone, ugly name
We knew it was coming to that broad area we like to call Europe sometime soon, and now Panasonic's sharing the details on its Android-based return. Details about the 3.6 ounce (103 gram) device include that it's packing a 4.3-inch qHD (960 x 540) screen that's wrapped in a dust and water-proof shell. It'll also be able to throw audio, video and web content to HDTVs of the same branding. Of course, a device like this deserves an equally enticing name, so you'll be delighted to hear that the handset's going to be called, oh, really? Eluga? Wow.However, that's not where the story ends, because we also received details about a phone that's just arrived on Japan's NTT DoCoMo. The Next Series P-04D is a "deep purple" (hush, now) handset that measures and weighs the same, has a 4.3-inch qHD OLED display, is running a 1.0GHz dual-core OMAP 4430 CPU and was also manufactured by Panasonic. We might not be so bold as to suggest both handsets are the same, but we might think about importing the P-04D just so we never have to say Eluga out loud.Mat Smith contributed to this report
