CTIA Wireless 2008: Four New GSM Handsets From Kyocera

Kyocera is not a major player in the global mobile market, but this might change pretty soon, as the Japanese producer has big future plans. At this year's edition of CTIA Wireless (1 - 3 April, Las Vegas), the company announced 3 new CDMA handsets as well as four new GSM phones.

Being the first Kyocera devices to work on GSM networks, the four new phones are not on the high-end side, resembling here the CDMA one that we talked about yesterday.

E4600 is the Kyocera GSM phone with the most advanced specs. The handset is a slider that looks nice and packs multimedia features, including a 2.2 inch display, Media player, 2 Megapixel camera with Flash and video recording, Bluetooh, WAP 2.0 and email, e-book reader, microSD card support, and a battery that should provide up to 8 hours of talk-time and around 500 hours of stand-by time.

Kyocera E3500 is a clamshell that also has multimedia features, but a bit less evolved. The phone comes with a 2.0 inch internal TFT display (262k colors), an 1 inch 65k CSTN external display, an 1.3 Megapixel camera, Music player, Bluetooth, microSD card support and a battery similar to the one packed in the E4600 model.

Furthermore, Kyocera E2500 is a slim candybar (12.2 mm in thickness) that comes with Music player, an 1.3-Megapixel camera, Bluetooth, microSD card slot and a 2.0 inch CSTN display, while Kyocera S1600 is a very basic handset with a VGA camera.

All the mentioned handsets will be first available in Latin America, starting this month, for prices that have not been revealed yet.

Besides the seven new mobile phones announced (GSM and CDMA), another - more important - detail, that favors Kyocera to become a major mobile phone brand, is the fact that the company recently acquired Sanyo, another Japanese producer, becoming the sixth largest handset manufacturer in the world (theoretically, at least).

We'll see soon if the K-company has what it takes to battle Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson or the not-too-great-lately Motorola. Anyway, knowing that Kyocera comes from Japan, I assume it'll put on a nice mobile show, if I may say so. And I may.