Think your 5-inch phone is big? Here's a handset from China carrying a tablet-class display
The 5.7-inch Galaxy Note 3? Tiny. The 5.9-inch HTC One Max? Petite. Sony's 6.4-inch Z Ultra? Dwarfed. Meet the Hisense X1 handset, on show at the Chinese manufacturer's CES booth in Las Vegas today. With a gargantuan 6.8-inch 1080p display, the X1 is almost as large as some of the smaller Android tablets out there — and while we weren't able to pocket-test the devices on show here today, we did have difficulty using it with any less than two hands. And externally it looks more than a little like the HTC One, with metallic sections at the top and bottom, and a subtly curved back panel. A variety of colors are available, including matte black, a glossier white and metallic blue and grey.
On the inside the device runs a quad-core Snapdragon CPU at 2.3GHz — likely a Snapdragon 800 — with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage, so we're looking at typical high-end Android internals. There's a 13-megapixel camera around the back, a 5-megapixel front-facer and a whopping 3,900mAh battery to power the gigantic display. The model on show at the Hisense CES booth is for China Mobile, with 4G LTE support for that carrier. The X1 runs Android 4.3 Jelly Bean with Hisense's own custom UI, which focuses on flat icons and pastel colors, and performance is just as speedy as we'd expect from the hardware.
It's unclear whether the X1 in its current configuration will ever see a U.S. release, but buyers on China Mobile should be able to pick it up later this year, along with a range of accessories. We've got both of our hands on the Hisense X1 in our video after the break, along with some more photos.
