The retro gaming company that everybody loved during the 80’s is back, as Commodore today announced a new smartphone with an old-school twist.
For you oldies out there, you’ll probably remember Commodore as a prominent force in the 1980’s who went toe-to-toe with British company Spectrum. They were both vying for complete control of your personal computing needs, with the Commodore 64 in one corner and the ZX Spectrum in the other.
Both companies unfortunately went under in the mid 90’s, with Commodore putting their last efforts into the ill-fated Amiga CD32. The company has continued to exist in a diluted form, creating custom desktops but not much else. Now, they’ve decided to take the fight into uncharted territory. Believe it or not, Commodore are releasing a smartphone.
The Commodore PET is a new attempt from the company at reinventing themselves in the modern era, running on a custom version of Android 5.0. It comes with a decent 1920 x 1080 IPS display, putting it on the same level as other upper mid-range devices. The classic Commodore logo is present on the case and the device will use a 1.7 GHz octa-core Mediatek CPU. The rear camera will be an impressive 13 megapixels, while the front camera is a very high 8 megapixels. A cool feature of the front camera is its 80-degree wide angle lens, which should help a great deal in capturing those group selfies. It also comes with a large 3,000 mAh battery and dual-SIM 4G LTE as standard.
A unique feature of the device will be its focus on classic retro gaming, of which Commodore is obviously no stranger to. When it launches later this week in select parts of Europe, it will ship with two custom emulators which each serve a different console released by the company. Prices for the handset are very reasonable, costing around $300 (£192) for 16GB storage and 2GB RAM. Additionally, there is a more premium version costing roughly $365 (£234), which includes 32GB memory and 3GB RAM. Both will include expandable memory, with a 32GB microSD included in the box. A nice touch.
Initially, the device will only be available in Italy, France, Germany, and Poland. More countries are expected to get it in the near future.
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via Wired