ZTC 8898, the Sony Ericsson & HTC Wannabe

Written by IT News on 9:29 PM

By: Florin Troaca, Communications News Editor | softpedia.com

Imitation (voluntarily or not) is not an uncommon thing in the mobile industry. There are, were and will always be cases of devices that resemble other devices.
If we only think about the iPhone and the army of handsets that tried to copy its look, we have enough material to study for a long, long time.

ZTC, the Chinese manufacturer, brings now a phone that wants to resemble not just one other brand, but other two. The handset, named ZTC 8898, is a dual-band GSM phone working on the 900 / 1800 Mhz network. When closed, it offers a pretty nice view, looking like a K-series phone from Sony Ericsson. The not so nice view comes when the device is open and reveals a HTC-like full QWERTY keyboard. Which wouldn't have been such a big problem if everything had looked as stylish as on the HTC handsets, but compared to them, the ZTC 8898 appears cheap and amateurish. The keyboard is weird, coming with Windows and Internet Explorer keys, despite the fact that the phone's interface doesn't look at all like a Windows one. Furthermore, the two speakers on the right and left side of the screen look like they belong to my grandmother's old radio – not a nice thing to see on a mobile device.

ZTC 8898 comes with two big displays, an external 2.5 inch one featuring touchscreen, and an internal 2.8 inch one. The latter is probably intended to be used mainly for games, since the phone has a built-in NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) Game Simulator and is said to support up to 4000 NES Games.

The phone has a fair dimension (108 × 51 × 18 millimeters) considering its big screens and the QWERTY keyboard, and also packs other features that are not bad: GPRS, dual-sim card slots, MP3 and MP4 player, Bluetooth, microSD support and a 1.3 Megapixel camera.

What's cool – and I mean it – about the phone is that it packs two 2200 mAh batteries which provide a talk-time of up to 500 minutes and an incredible stand-by time of up to 900 hours, meaning more than a whole month!

Although ZTC 8898 doesn't appear on the producer's official site, the phone can be bought from DealExtreme, an international online shopping center, for the price of 189 US Dollars. I say "good luck" to those who wish to try it.