Can Konka's $250 3D Android Phone Revolutionize the User Experience?

Earlier today, we met with Tero Sarkkinen, CEO of up-and-coming UI development power house Rightware. We were shown a series of new phones featuring a 3D interface, starting with Konka E900.

Konka is a smartphone manufacturer from mainland China, focusing on more affordable end of the spectrum. Their facilities are spread throughout China, Indonesia and Mexico. As you can see on their website, the company produces featurephones and smartphones bearing resemblance to the old cellphone designs from western manufacturer.



On the video above, you can see E900, their first true smartphone which retails for 1500 RMB, i.e. around 200 EUR or 235 U.S. Dollars. For that amount of money, you get comes with a nicely sized 4.0 inch display running on a MediaTek (MTK) 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor. The whole User Interface is in 3D, with Rightware optimizing the software overlay to the point where they are not using CPU at all, but rather churning through as much GPU cycles as possible, and leave all the CPU power for users - shooting images, playing games, watching video - all of that works in 3D.

The interface itself is impressive, since it changes from day to night and back, while the sun rays shift from one side to another, causing the flow of shadows from left to the right side of the image (yes, it was afternoon when we recorded the video, thus the rays were on the left, and shadow was on the right).

All in all, it is impressive what experienced UI team can do with the hardware constraints they had.