Something Revolutionary – the Emblaze Mobile First ELSE

Launched in London this week is the new Emblaze Mobile First Else smartphone. It doesn't ring as loud a bell as an HTC or Blackberry smartphone, but you have the promise of a very capable and remarkably unique handset that, if the Israel-based Emblaze Mobile company plays its cards well, could give the major players a run for their money.

The Smartphone Challenge

Emblaze is not new to the business as it's been there over the last decade, providing its markets with low cost featured phones and providing mobile telephone technologies to other companies as an OEM. Recently, it embarked on an ambitious project called "Monolith" teaming up with Japanese Access, known for its NetFront browser and co-developer for the Palm OS.

The result of this 2-year joint technical collaboration is another new Access-flavored Linux-based operating system called Else Intuition to run the new First Else smartphone sporting a slab design inspired by the monolith slab in Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001:A Space Odyssey.

The challenge for the Emblaze Mobile First Else is convincing the tech savvy smartphone market that it is as good, if not better, than the emerging Android smartphones sweeping the market. The world of smartphone may still have room for the new Else Intuition side by side with the Android and other platforms that are slowly losing favour in the market.

For sure, the First Else's UI is nothing like any UI in the market today. It sports a unique menu set arranged in a dial-up-like fashion and is designed to be operated with just one hand courtesy of its gesture-sensitive multi-touch capacitive touchscreen and a persistent control points on the right side of its large 3.5-inch WVGA display.

The new handset is not wanting of upscale features found only in expensive smartphones. You get a 3/3.5G data connectivity on a quad band GLSM handset powered by the same Texas Instrument OMAP 3430 engine that is found in the iPhone 3Gs, Nokia N900 and the Motorola Droid.

It has WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR, mini USB 2.0, GPS, accelerometer and primary sensors 3.5mm headphone jack, and a high end 5-megapixel autofocus camera with image stabilization. There's an internal Flash memory of either 16 GB or 32 GB but without expandability options. It has a generous 1450 mAh LI battery but the talk times remain unreleased

Lastly, Emblaze Mobile knows the value of having an online apps store like what iPhone has. It knows too well that iPhone's success has been largely due to its hundreds of thousands of apps and games downloadable to make the handset as exciting to use as it was when taken out of the box the first time. It has readied its apps store with an API it is releasing with the handset for developers to start developing mobile application software on its new platform.

Availability

Emblaze Mobile has recently renamed itself as Else Ltd. It can be a bit awkward referring to the new smartphone as Else's First Else. But that's just how it should be called. It is expected to debut in the UK this spring and made available to the European and US markets thereafter. Else Ltd is already talking with various major network providers in Europe and the US. Pricing has yet to be announced though we expect this to be anything affordable.

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