Friday, July 13, 2018

The 15th-anniversary Infobar is a beautiful Japanese Android feature phone

I’ve waxed lyrical over KDDI’s gorgeous, Japan-exclusive Infobar series of phones in The Verge’s figurative pages before, and the first model in three years was just announced: this is the Infobar XV. As the name alludes to, it’s actually an anniversary phone, celebrating a decade and a half since the first Infobar was released in October 2003.

It looks a lot like the 2007 Infobar 2, my personal favorite of the range, and it moves away from more recent models in that it’s not really a smartphone. It runs Android as a base, yes, but KDDI says the software atop it has been designed from a feature-phone perspective, and the Infobar XV has the physical buttons to match. This means you can run essential apps for Japan like Line on an LTE...

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