14 DAY TRIAL // Romanian company Visual Fan, the owner of the Allview brand has just announced the availability of the Allview Q1 feature-phone. The device marks a premiere in Romania, as this is the first phone to feature 3G connectivity, Wi-Fi and dual-SIM at the same time.
Thanks to its full QWERTY keyboard, the handset resembles RIM's Blackberry smartphones. This becomes more obvious as the handset also “borrows” Blackberry's touch-pad button.
The front part of the bar phone is encased in a metallic frame, which gives the handset a more solid and pricy look compared with other mid-budget handsets, while the back is made out of glossy plastic.
Allview Q1 measures 110 x 61.5 x 13.5 mm and weighs 130g (battery included). It comes with a medium-sized 2.4-inch TFT display with support for 262k colors and 320 x 240 pixels resolution.
The mobile phone includes a 3.2-megapixel camera with digital zoom (8x) and video recording capabilities (720 x 480 pixels), as well as secondary 0.3-megapixel front camera that can be used to take snapshots. It is unclear if the phone offers the video-calling feature.
The Q1 is an active dual-SIM feature-phone, which means that it works with both SIMs active at the same time. Unlike standby dual-SIM phones, which require users to switch from one SIM to another as needed.
Even though Allview Q1 is a simple feature-phone it packs lots of third-party applications that makes it more appealing for consumers. This includes apps such as Bolt browser, E-buddy (Yahoo, MSN, Facebook), Snaptu, Weather and PushMail.
The bar handset also includes a document viewer that enables users to read Word, Excel or PDF files, as well as .zip/.rar compression software.
Other key features of the handset include WiFi 802.11 b/g connectivity, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP support, FM radio, 60 MB internal memory and microSD card slot for memory expansion (up to 32GB).
The phone includes a 1100 mAh Li-Ion battery which is rated by the manufacturer for 110 hours (80 hours for 3G) standby time or 4 hours (2 hours and 30 minutes for 3G) talk time.
Allview Q1 is now available in Romania for 519 RON (about $162). There's no information regarding the phone's worldwide availability at the moment.
