Chinese smartphone vendor Elephone has started pre-bookings for its Vowney smartphone on its website for a price of $299.99, even though the company is yet to officially launch the handset till now. The Elephone Vowney will be available in two different versions – while Version A will run purely on Android 5.0 Lollipop, the phone will also be offered in a second variant which will be powered by an Intel chip with a quad-core processor, and will have dual-boot capabilities with a choice between Android and Windows 10. While the version on sale is the Android-only variant, it isn’t immediately clear if the Intel-powered version will also come with the same price-tag.
Coming to the hardware specs of the Vowney, both versions of the device will feature a 5.5-inch IPS LCD display with a QHD (2564 x 1440) pixel resolution, and will come with 3 or 4 GB of RAM depending on the variant. The handset will also come with 32 GB of built-in storage, according to the product-page on Elephone’s offcial web-store. Version A of the smartphone will be powered by MediaTek’s MT6795 chipset, which comes with an octa-core CPU clocked at 2.2 GHz and an IMG G6200 GPU clocked at 700 MHz. Version B meanwhile, is said to be powered by an Intel chip, as mentioned already. As for the imaging prowess of the Vowney, the primary rear-facing camera comes with a 20.7-megapixel Sony IMX230 sensor with auto-focus and LED flash, whereas the front-facing selfie-cam will feature a 5-megapixel sensor. The smartphone will come with support for GSM (850/900/1800/1900 MHz), WCDMA (850/900/1900/2100MHz) and FDD-LTE (800/1800/2100/2600MHz) along with dual-band Wifi 802.11 a/b/g/n. The phone also carries a rather large 3,800 mAh Li-ion battery.
At $300, The Elephone Vowney will be the company’s most expensive offering thus far, meaning, it will have to compete with smartphones from globally more recognizable brands like Motorola, OnePlus and Asus. While the pricing of the Moto X Play is yet to be announced, the device will probably fall in the same category price-wise as the Elephone Vowney, whereas the OnePlus 2 pricing will start from $329. The unlocked, SIM-free version of the OnePlus 2 goes on sale officially on Tuesday in India and in France. As for Asus, the ZenFone 2 range starts at around the $300 dollar mark for the 4 GB RAM version in most countries globally.