JAQ and SPL by i-mate

12 Sep, 2006

Two new smarties are in town as it seems, as i-mate announced today at the CTIA Wireless in L.A. that they are officially launching i-mate JAQ and i-mate SPL.

Long known as one of the faithful partners of HTC, i-mate has now taken another direction. May be the reason is the new marketing strategy of HTC which decided to start manufacturing phones under its own brand.

i-mate JAQ

The i-mate JAQ is a business-oriented Pocket PC and it seems that it has been manufactured by Inventec which has been a manufacturer of Palm devices for a long time now. The new i-mate JAQ is probably based on the Mercury prototype put in for approval before the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) by Inventec. Information on the Mercury leaked a while ago and back then it was considered as the next Palm in line.

The i-mate branded JAQ is powered by a 200MHz Texas Instruments OMAP 850 processor and has 128MB ROM/64MB RAM. The landscape TFT touch screen display has a diagonal of 2.8", supports 64K colors and is capable of a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels. There's no Wi-Fi or UMTS support, but the handset does have Bluetooth 1.2, USB, IrDA and a quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE. There is also a MiniSD card slot but unfortunately, lacks a camera. The device is equipped with a 36-keys QWERTY keyboard and works under Windows Mobile 5.0 for Pocket PC. The JAQ measures 122 x 71 x 22 mm and weighs 160g along with the 1440mAh Li-Ion battery. The form factor of the JAQ resembles those used by Motorola Q and Samsung i320 but physically compared to them it's more than huge.

i-mate SPL

The i-mate SPL is a smartphone with a more fashionable design and in fact it resembles a lot the Motorola SLVR L7. It has tri-band GSM/GPRS support (850 or 900 MHz depending on the market), 2.2" TFT display with a 240x320 pixels resolution, a 2 megapixel camera and it has a miniSD card slot along with a miniUSB connectivity port. The Windows Mobile 5.0 for Smartphone OS relies on the 200 MHz TI OMAP730 processor and the 128MB ROM/64MB RAM for its working efficiency. The device measures 114 x 49 x 12 mm and weighs 102g.

Reader comments

Anonymous
15 Sep 2006
MJT

ok first of all vk mobile are still going strong and have few new handsets out soon that look nothing like the l7 i think the blue slide phone will be a top seller.; but this phone will be a hugh sucess because it will benefit new businhess that cann...

Gagbag
14 Sep 2006
QHV

Please,i'm not CRITISIZING the phone.One of the things that make a company special is its originality.Remember VkMoblie?(now bankrupt.)A lot of effort was put to making most of their phones look like L7.The outcome?Well i think i alredy stated that.....