Remember the Sharp Aquos Crystal? Yeah, that handset which came out of nowhere in August last year and showed off its interesting no-side-or-top-bezel concept. Sharp definitely isn’t the first company you’ll think off when someone mentions the word “smartphone”, but they really did make a rather interesting device last year, and it wasn’t that expensive either. The bottom “chin” isn’t exactly for everyone, but if that doesn’t bother you then this device is… well, really solid. Sharp isn’t that well-known for making smartphones, but they are one of the top LCD screen suppliers to various manufacturers though.
The Aquos Crystal reached the U.S. a while ago, Sprint carries it and that’s why many of you have probably heard of that device. This Japanese smartphone manufacturer has also unveiled a higher-end version of this device called Aquos Crystal X, which we’ve already talked about in December. Well, Arstechnica managed to get their hands on a copy of this device and do a hands-on with it. You can check out those images in a gallery below this article, one of which shows both of these devices one next to to the other. The Aquos Crystal X is a bigger variant of the Aquos Crystal, it sports a bigger 5.5-inch panel, compared to the 4.7-inch display on the Aquos Crystal. Other than that, these two handset are very similar in terms of design. The front-facing camera and the microphone switched their positions, and the chin on the Aquos Crystal is a bit taller than the one on the Aquos Crystal X, but other than that, they’re almost identical as far as the design goes.
As far as specs go, Aquos Crystal X features a 5.5-inch 1080p (1920 x 1080) LCD display along with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage. This handset is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 quad-core chip clocked at 2.3GHz and ships with a 2,610mAh battery on the inside. 13-megapixel camera is located at the back of this handset, and a 2.1-megapixel snapper is available on its front side. This device measures 139 x 73 x 11mm and it’s the most compact 5.5-inch device in the world. This thing runs Android 4.4 KitKat and is skinned by Sharp, it’s not a heavy skin though, far from it. The company skinned only parts of the UI.
