Sharp Aquos Crystal phone: Where's the bezel?

Just when you thought a fashionable gadget must be somewhat thin, Sharp is going to charm the smartphone fashion-conscious with a crazily thin phone, and it is arriving in the US quite soon. Gorgeous. Cool. Hot. Absurdly Slim Bezels. Just a few of the descriptive words used as tech sites got busy on Monday spreading the news. They reported an announcement about two Sharp phones. Sharp just launched a phone in Japan and one of the two is coming to America. The company announced two Aquos Crystal phones. The show-stopping feature on both is that there is hardly any bezel around their displays. The where's-the-bezel phones were developed with SoftBank and Sprint. The news could be announced on Tuesday at a scheduled event for the press by Sprint.

Why are the tech sites rather confident about their guess that the Sprint event will be all about the phone? After all, said PhoneArena, the tagline on the event is "Take the edge off." What's more, invitations were richly decorated with crystals. The Aquos Crystal has what PhoneArena calls "a Harman Kardon sound effects engine." "LiveStage" streaming, and native compatibility with the Harman Kardon ONYX Studio Bluetooth speaker. What's more, said PhoneArena, the Aquos Crystal is scheduled for release on August 29 in the United States, and pre-orders star tomorrow. The full specs: The Aquos Crystal is 5 inches (131mm) in height and 2.6 inches (67mm) in width at a substantial 0.39 inches (10mm) thickness. It weighs 5 ounces (140 grams). It has a 5-inch 720p display, LTE-capable quad-core Snapdragon 400 SoC running at 1.2GHz and 1.5GB of RAM, 8GB of storage space, and runs on Android 4.4.2.

The flagship version of the phone, upgraded to a 5.5-inch 1080p display, Snapdragon 801 CPU clocked to 2.3GHz, and 2GB RAM, will for now stay in Japan.

Commenting on the buzzfest around the phone, Kif Leswing in Gigaom remarked that Softbank, the parent company of Sprint, hopes that "an exclusive, competitively priced line of bezel-less Sharp smartphones can help differentiate its carriers." At the right price, he added, a bezel-less device could be extremely attractive. Leswing also noted that Sharp is known for its LCD TVs and smartphone screens for other manufacturers.

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