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.
