I-mate Intelegent phone to shoehorn Windows 8 on a 4.7" screen for $750, dock in tow
Then its partnership with HTC fell flat, board members were accused of fraud, and we haven't seen anything from it for a few years already, just knew it relocated to Redmond, WA. That's until Microsoft came out with Windows 8. Although it said its new touch-oriented OS is not to be shoehorned in a phone, at least not yet, as it is not optimized for the smaller screens, i-mate went ahead and did just that.
The first phone running Windows 8 (not WP8) is apparently going by the clever codename Intelegent, and will be sold later this year at a $750 price point without any carrier subsidies, with GSM and CDMA radios inside.
They did have to build their own cellular connectivity interface, complete with a dialer and backend APIs, as Win 8 isn't meant for phone calls, so they get routed through the Lync communication software, but the system i-mate built goes around the wake-up times needs of the full desktop OS, and takes just 45 milliseconds to respond and pick up an incoming call.
Another interesting detail, however, is that the Intelegent will have a docking system, similar to the Asus Padfone franchise, with a tablet screen option to which the phone can beam videos wirelessly, for example. That whole kit is expected to cost $1600, but hasn't been demonstrated in the videos the company showed. Now all that is left is for i-mate to iron out the kinks and put the Intelegent on sale for a pretty interesting experiment. Its CEO Jim Morrison thinks that with the upcoming Windows Blue update, which is scaled for smaller screens, the task will be even easier.
source: PCWorld
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