A Chinese appliance company best-known in the US for its air conditioners has demonstrated a Linux cameraphone at a wireless tradeshow in New Orleans this week. The Haier N60 features a 1.3 megapixel camera, an SDIO expansion slot, and built-in MP3 and MPEG4 players.

SDIO is a low-power peripheral interface based on the SD/MMC memory card form-factor. The N60's SDIO interface should enable it to support SDIO Wi-Fi and/or Bluetooth cards. Wi-Fi, in particular, seems increasingly popular among Linux phone developers; Motorola's recent A768 and NEC's N900iL both include Wi-Fi capabilities.

According to PC Magazine, the N60 is a tri-band GSM/GPRS phone supporting the 900/1800/1900MHz bands, suggesting the phone may not be heavily marketed in the US. However, the phone should work with T-Mobile networks here. And, Haier displayed the phone at the CTIA (Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association) trade show this week in New Orleans. Additionally, the N60 is listed on Haier's “Haier America” website.

According to Haier, the N60 includes a QVGA (240 x 320) color touchscreen supporting 260K colors. The device includes handwriting recognition software, and ZiPredictive text input. It includes a phone book supporting 500 entries, and supports hands-free speaker phone operation.

The device runs a Linux-based operating system, along with a Java MIDP2.0 environment. It comes with an MP3 player, MPEG4 video player, TVLink software, and a variety of messaging clients, including SMS and MMS. It is equipped with a WAP 2.0 browser, and includes 64 polyphonic ring tones, the company says.

The N60 includes a 900mAh lithium-ion battery, good for a claimed three hours of talk time, or 200 hours of standby time. Additional software includes a calculator, world clock, calendar, PCSync software, and games.

The N69 measures 1.9 x 1 x 3.7 inches and weighs 0.28 pounds. It has been approved by the FCC, IC, UL, and the PTCRB, according to Haier.

The brief PC Magazine story about the N60 (and other phones shown at CTIA) is here.

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.