For Android users who are bored by the less than stylish design of most Android smartphones, help is here and in the form of the T2 smartphone by a fairly young handset maker, Smartisan. A follow up to its ambidextrous handset that features a pretty mind-blowing aesthetic, the T2 upped the ante in the design once again – this time with ultra minimalist aluminum frame with no visible screws and SIM tray, and it does even have a power button. There’s no advanced technology here though; the Home button, which is one of the three customizable physical buttons, now also serves as the Power button. Odd that Smartisan is sticking to hard buttons, while many Android handsets already ditched physical three-button setup in favor of soft keys.
To be fair, the T2 is not without innovations. With the back now made non-removable and the effort to get rid of the ‘ugly’ SIM tray, Smartisan has eliminated the plastic bands typically found on metal frame handsets and cleverly relocated the SIM tray to be under the volume rocker. It works the same as any SIM tray, which means it requires poking a pin to pop out the tray which in this case, is also the volume rocker. Like before, it sports two of such rockers, one for the volume and the other, for brightness control and both buttons are customizable; meaning the function can switch side to suit left or right handed user. Furthermore, it also boasts a seamless bezel which took the company 588 days of research and development.
Beyond the allure of the undeniably pretty aesthetic, the T2 is just another Android smartphone (read: nothing spectacular). You can expect a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 (MSM8992) hexa-core chip, packing two 1.82 GHz Cortex A57, four 1.44GHz Cortex A53 processors and a 625MHz Adreno 418 3D GPU, lurking under the hood. Other technical details include JDI 4.95-inch 1080p Pixel Eyes touch display, 3GB RAM (933MHz LPDDR3, if you must really know), 16 or 32GB eMMC 5.0 storage, 2.5D Gorilla Glass 3 front and back, a 13MP f2.0 main camera with LED flash capable of 4K videoing, a 5MP front-facing camera, a 2,670 mAh battery, plus the usual servings of connectivity and sensors like dual-band wireless ac, Bluetooth 4.1 LE, NFC, gyroscope, proximity sensor et cetera.
The Smartisan T2 runs on an Android 5.1-based Smartisan OS 2.5, which will also be available to its predecessor. On the pricing aspect, the T2 is slightly cheaper than the T1 at launch, with the 16GB model going for 2,499 Chinese yuan and the 32GB version costing a hundred yuan more (about US$385 and US$400, respectively). Unfortunately, if you want one, I guess you will have to muster your Chinese resources as there’s no word if it will be making way out of mainland China.
