The spiritual successor of Nokia E7 announced at MWC19 as F(x)tec Pro1
At the beginning of January, we covered an interesting upcoming phone under the name Livermorium F(x). The interesting things about the phone were its form factor, that strongly reminds of the iconic Nokia E7, and the fact that former Nokia E7 engineers have been working on F(x). At MWC2019, the device went official as F(x)tec Pro 1.
The F(x)tec Pro 1 comes in an aluminum body, with a 5.99-inch FullHD+ display on front, and a five-row keyboard underneath. The keyboard opens up the same way as on the Nokia E7 or Nokia N950 MeeGo developer device, and is a truly unique phone at the moment. On the back we have a 12MP+5MP dual camera setup and a 3200mAh battery beneath. Inside the device clocks the Snapdragon 835 with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, expandable via a MicroSD card. There is also a 3.5mm headphone jack, NFC and a wide support for different radio bands, that makes the device a truly global phone, according to the specs sheet.
What’s special about this phone is, of course, the landscape QWERTY keyboard with 64 keys, sliding at 155 degrees. The Android 9 Pie UI is also optimized for better landscape usage, with Play Store and Google Pay on-board. The phone also has stereo speakers, notification LED, a side-mounted fingerprint sensor, and a 2-stage camera shutter key. So, you basically have everything you can wish on a phone, with the only drawback being the two years old Snapdragon 835, while assuming the rear camera is at least decent.
Livermorium started taking pre-orders for the device for €649/$649, with the deliveries starting in July. You can check everything about the Pro 1 at the official site here.
The Pro 1 looks like a great phone and offers something different on the market. Planet Gemini comes in a similar form factor, but they are not really in the same category of devices. I’m impressed that the Pro 1 packs almost everything you can wish on a device – if it had an (micro) HDMI port and FM Radio it would basically be just like a Symbian phone back in the days. The design language is also Nokia-esque.
What do you say? Is there a market for such devices?
Update: HDMI output through Type-C (video only) and FM Radio is also there, so it basically has everything.
