First Look: Our Sneak Peak at Panasonic's Smartphone

Panasonic last week announced the upcoming launch of its first Android smartphone in Europe in March 2012. We've been lucky enough to see this intriguing model in the flesh, and we've even managed to try it out. We didn't handle it for long, but from first impressions, we like what we saw.

With rumours intensifying about a Panasonic smartphone, fuelled by the increasingly impressive crossover between mobiles and compact cameras, the firm's much-talked-of mobile was officially announced last week. There's no doubt that Panasonic's smartphone will be one of the most eagerly awaited products of early 2012, with its official unveiling scheduled for the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona in February. Could this be Panasonic's big comeback in the European mobile phone market?

A scene from the movie, 'Cloverfield'

In the meantime, we just couldn't wait to find out more about Panasonic's phone. In fact, we were adamant that we wanted to take a look at it for ourselves, so we pulled out all the stops to blag ourselves a quick hands-on with  the phone ... on the condition that we agreed not to take any photos and not to talk about any of the components. As the mobile won't be hitting stores for another three months, the smartphone we saw was actually still a prototype, although it was clearly a very advanced prototype. It's finish, in particular, won't be a million miles from the final product.

We found Panasonic's mobile had a fairly subtle, sober design and that it felt like holding a kind of big, smooth, completely uniform pebble. Plus, we were pleasantly surprised to see that the backlighting behind the touch-sensitive buttons and the Panasonic logo could be switched off.

Slim and Light

The Panasonic smartphone is very light and very slim indeed. In fact, it's thinner than Apple's iPhone 4 and Samsung's Galaxy S II.

One other very original thing about this phone is that it's waterproof. Thankfully, though, this feature has practically no visible impact on the product's design. While waterproof devices like cameras often have bulky, ugly casings that scream 'I'M WATERPROOF' Panasonic's smartphone looks as sleek and as stylish as any other phone. The only clues to its underwater credentials are its smooth, all-in-one casing with no visible joints and the waterproof covers for the connections ports, which are moulded subtly and seamlessly into the phone's body—a very nice touch!

We couldn't resist taking a look at the OS and checking out the phone's responsiveness, even if we were warned that the whole software part of the phone was due to be reworked before its actual release. We therefore aren't allowed to go into detail about any innovative new navigation features we spotted, any NFC-related functions or any tools for managing multimedia content. It's still a work in progress, apparently, and so we're not allowed to tell you what we saw.



One thing we did spot was that when browsing through the phone's menus, the three touch-control buttons at the bottom of the handset light up. These three buttons mirror the controls already seen in the first Android 4 smartphone to come to market, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus (currently being tested in our labs), although Panasonic's prototype is currently running on Android 2.3. Note that when you start watching a film in full screen mode, the light-up buttons switch themselves off so you won't be distracted (see top photo).

Unfortunately, that's all we can tell you about our brief hands-on. We weren't even allowed to test the camera, which is one of the features we were most keen to see in action, as apparently it wasn't operational yet.

All we can say is that we're looking forwards to seeing more!

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