After the first laugh, phablets are coming in style. Every manufacturer has at least one model, they are powerful, and they are funny. Here are the most interesting models currently on the market.
Article continues below
Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Note 4, a beefed up, premium version of last year's top Galaxy phablet. If that wasn't a dream come true for follower of large-screened devices, Samsung also unveiled the Galaxy Note Edge. It has the same basic specs as the Note 4 but has a uniquely folded display that adds 160px on the right side of the device. It enables a variety of gestures and tricks. If you think this is nonsense, thing again: Everybody laughed at Samsung's phablet, now everybody and his dog must have one.
Alcatel announced the successor to its Hero smartphone, OneTouch Hero 2. The phablet has a 6 inch display just like its predecessor with the same resolution, 1920 x 1080 with a pixel density of 367PPI. The screen is protected by Dragontrail glass and also comes with OGS full lamination and oleophobic coating. The CPU has been upgraded to an Octa-Core 2GHz Mediatek MT6592 chip with Mali-450 GPU clocked at 700MHz. There is also 2GB RAM on board for smooth performance and 16GB on board storage with a microSD card slot for expanding the memory up to 32GB.
The Huawei Ascend Mate 7 has an enormous 6-inch display. And it's the fastest beast of them all. Huawei Ascend Mate7 phablet features Cat 6 LTE networking support which offers crazy 300Mbps data speeds. The 6-inch screen has a 1080p resolution. Huawei has added an easy access single-handed mode, where the keyboard and even the Android buttons below the screen shift over to one side. Inside there is a Kirin 925, Huawei's own octa-core chips with 4G LTE connectivity. Huawei will produce two versions of the Mate 7, and there is also a huge 4,100mAh battery.
The HTC Desire 820 features a 64-bit octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 SoC (1.5GHz quad-core + 1.0GHz quad-core) coupled with 2GB of RAM. The Desire 820 packs a 13-megapixel (with f/2.2 lens) rear facing camera with LED flash and BSI sensor, apart from an 8-megapixel secondary front-facing camera. It also has 4G LTE Cat. It features a 5.5-inch HD (720x1280 pixels) display. The dual-SIM (Nano-SIM) HTC Desire 820 runs Android 4.4 KitKat with HTC Sense UI on top. The HTC Desire 820 packs a 2600mAh battery.
And there is iPhone 6 Plus. It is a very thin device, made even more so by the nicely rounded edges and the manufacturing that borders with perfection. 5.5-inch display finally found its place on an Apple device, and Retina HD guarantees a very sharp picture. The resolution is 1920x1080, that's probably what you have on your big desktop monitor, and it's powered by an A8 chip built on second-generation 64-bit desktop-class architecture. It is full of sensors and iOS 8 fits nicely to the big screen.
So, the concept once considered as a joke is now something every manufacturer wants to have in the portfolio. If you ever tried to use social networks or read something on a smaller screen, there's no doubt you were thinking about something bigger. Now you have your choice and that's because this time manufacturers listened what consumers had to say. And that is definitively a good strategy that benefits both customers and manufacturers. ■
