Fujitsu, better known for its notebooks in the US, actually makes phones, but only for Japanese market. The company now takes its first step into the smartphone market outside Japan with a partnership with France Telecom-Orange. The first device heading to Europe will be the STYLISTIC S01, a smartphone designed especially for senior users.
To help senior users avoid accidental touches and prevent unintended operation, the touchscreen of Fujitsu’s S01, though capacitive, uses a unique screen technology that requires users to apply the same level of pressure to on-screen icons as they would to buttons on a keypad. For easy operation, the handset features super large icons and a simplified layout, as you can see in the picture above. It even includes audio technology to make the phone senior-friendly. The phone can optimize the frequency range based on a user’s age, so senior users can hear the voice of the person on the other end of the call easier, and it can slow down the speech of callers who speak rapidly without lowering the pitch of their voice or changing the length of the conversation.
The STYLISTIC S01 is a full-featured smartphone running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich on a 1.4Ghz Qualcomm MSM8255 processor. It has a 4-inch 800×480 touchscreen, a 8.1 Megapixel camera, a 0.3 Megapixel front-facing camera, 4GB onboard memory and a microSD card slot. You can expect support for GPS, Bluetooth, WiFi and 3.5G HSPA connectivity. The handset is IP58-rated for water and dust-resistant and is equipped with a loud personal security alarm that can alert people around in emergency situations.
Fujitsu will showcase the S01 at the MWC 2013 in Barcelona, Spain.
[Fujitsu]
