14 DAY TRIAL // Although Panasonic promised it would conquer Europe with its products, it appears that the company still considers the Japanese market over the European one.
This is why the recently announced Panasonic ELUGA will be released in Japan on March 29 and in Europe a month later.
The smartphone will be exclusively available in purple at NTT Docomo starting next week. There are no details regarding the ELUGA’s pricing options yet, but we know that European prices are set at about £399 (630 USD) outright.
Even though the Panasonic ELUGA will be shipped with Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread platform out of the box, the Japanese company promised to upgrade the phone to Ice Cream Sandwich soon after launch.
The selling point of the smartphone seems the thin bar form factor as the ELUGA comes in at 123 x 62 x 7.8 mm, and it only weighs a bit over 100g (battery included).
Unfortunately, the smartphone lacks a microSD card slot for memory expansion and only offers 8GB amount of storage.
Without pretending to be one of the most powerful Android phones on the market, Panasonic ELUGA embeds a dual-core TI OMAP 4430 processor clocked at 1 GHz and 1GB of RAM.
Panasonic ELUGA is IP57 certified which means it is dust and water resistant. According to the manufacturer, the smartphone has been tested for up to 1 meter for 30 minutes under water.
It also sports a 4.3-inch OLED capacitive touchscreen display that supports qHD (540 x 960 pixels) resolution, as well as an 8-megapixel rear photo snapper with autofocus and LED flash.
The ELUGA only accepts microSIM cards and drains energy from a rather low-capacity 1150 mAh Li-Ion battery, which is rated by the manufacturer for up to 300 hours of standby time or up to 4 hours of talk time.
