Television maker SONIQ is entering the smartphone market, announcing today that it will launch a line of cheap Android-powered smartphones in the second-half of the year. The phones will target a specific subset of prepaid users, namely the elderly and parents who are looking for a phone for their children.
The only problem? We’re not entirely sure what’s going to be inside the phone. For some reason, SONIQ won’t reveal the specs of the phone or any features of their new phone sometime around Q2 this year – and that’s very odd because most manufacturers will release this information at the same time as the phone announcement.
However, it did hint that the phone will include parental controls so parents can “control usage in a simple and straightforward approach.”
But if it’s anything like the image above – we’re not hoping for a lot. From what we can tell from the image, the phone will have an SOS button on the back, a 5-megapixel camera, and will run a skinned version of Android (what version we don’t know). And if that UI looks awfully familiar, that’s because it’s a badly done ripoff of the Windows Phone user interface.
Just got a press release about new Android phone by a company called SONIQ http://t.co/iM5SdaUQnT Looks like a huge Windows Phone UI ripoff
— Long Zheng (@longzheng) February 28, 2014
We’re hoping that it is a bad Photoshop job and not the actual interface.
SONIQ has not revealed the pricing or availability, saying that these will be announced in Q2.