Kyocera back with a smartphone

ELECTRONICS MANUFACTURER Kyocera unveiled a Sanyo-branded Zio M6000 Android smartphone at the CTIA Wireless 2010 show today.

Kyocera has been out of the smartphone business for a long time and it looks like it wants a big re-entry.

The company will launch the Zio smartphone in early summer and that will have a 3.5-inch "motion-enhanced" touchscreen with a trackball and a 3.2MP camera. It will support 30fps video record and playback and the obligatory Google Maps and social-networking widgets and applications like Facebook, Twitter and Open Table. The Zio will also have 256MB of memory and support 32GB through the microSD slot and have an accelerometer.

The Zio will have a virtual QWERTY keypad, and Kyocera said that it will offer talk time of up to six hours and standby of up to 18 days.

"Zio stands apart among Android devices because we intentionally set out to humanise this advanced technology and make it accessible and approachable for any consumer - without sacrificing functionality or style," said Tom Maguire, head of global marketing at Kyocera. "We're confident that Zio is the ideal platform to bring the power and customisation of Android to an entirely new audience." µ