High-performance mobile handsets have been a preserve of the rich, however, by early next year all that might change. There has been a trend by some mobile phone manufacturers towards the development of affordable low-cost smartphones.
The most recent and probably boldest move towards manufacture of low-cost smartphones is by Dubai-based Eurostar Group. The company has launched an impressive budget smartphone; the Tornado IQ455.
Tornado IQ455 is powered by an eight-processor chip. The only other three phones operating on eight processors are; HTC Desire 616, Samsung Galaxy S5 and Galaxy S4. The 5inch Tornado IQ455 comes at about one third the price of these handsets.
The chip in Tornado IQ455 is a MT6592 octa-core. It is based on ARM Cortex A7 processor. This is not only an energy efficient processor but it is one of the most efficient mobile chip architectures in the phone manufacturing industry. This means that it is scalable and effectively runs on low power. It also effectively handles processor intensive tasks.
All the eight processors are based on the 28nm High-performance mobile (HPM) process technology conveying speeds of 1.7 to 2GHz.
The chip supports ARM Mali-450MP graphics processor modules at 700MHz. This essentially means that the phone supports full HD features as well as 4K streaming. The phone has a 16Megapixel camera.
This phone is projected to hit the African smartphone market by the end of this year or early next year.
