The e2800 mobile phone from a small Shanghai-based company called e28 is proof that Linux phones can be made palatable for the mass consumer market.
While the e2800 shares many similarities with Motorola's Linux-based A760 mobile phone, it has better design features and a more user-friendly graphical user interface.
E28's E2800 smartphone sells for about $4,000 and is targeted at business users. Sold in the mainland since August, it is available in simplified and traditional Chinese as well as English.
It offers PDA functions, a clear, colour touch-screen, handwriting recognition, a low-resolution camera, and memory expansion to 512 megabytes through an Secure Digital card.
The 123-gram e2800 measures 98x59x26mm and is a dual band, GPRS device based on dual ARM 9 processors, running embedded Linux with a 2.4-series kernel.
It boots quickly from the included 32MB of Flash Ram, and includes another 32MB of SDRam. It can be expanded with SD/MMC cards, and comes with a free 16MB SD card from SanDisk.