Grundig Unveils The U900 Mobile Phone

Grundig Mobile's latest phone, the U900 is a slim multimedia clamshell with music dedicated keys on the front side. While not spectacular, it brings all the features most users might need, such as a 2 megapixel camera with flash, multishot and video recording capabilities, an MP3 player and Bluetooth for connectivity.

Also, it looks like this slim phone is a Linux powered device, based on a single-core, single-chip architecture. It was presented at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona where it was one of only two single-core Linux phones on display.

Now why is single-core better? Because single-core phones tend to reduce the design complexity as well as the bill-of-materials cost by using a single processor.

While the normal low-end handsets are single-chip, it is still a challenge for manufacturers to introduce such devices running Linux, Symbian or other OSes, thus lowering smartphone cost.

Up until now, it looks like there are no Symbian or Windows Mobile powered single-chip phones, but there are three such handsets running Linux, out of which none is actually shipping at the moment.

The U900 comes with support for quad-band GSM, GPRS EDGE and UMTS and includes several other features like a 2 inch 262k color display with a 240 x 320 pixel (QVGA) resolution, 100MB internal user memory, MicroSD card slot for memory expansion supporting cards of up to 1GB and an FM Radio.

All in all, it's a pretty nice handset that comes in a relatively small package, measuring 92 x 50 x 14 mm and weighing 94 grams. For the time being, Grundig Mobile only hinted at when their U900 might start shipping, but since a working handset was displayed at 3GSM, it shouldn't take them that long to make this mobile phone available.