Lenovo Shows Off More LePhone

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The LePhone is from China, not France, despite all our first impressions. The LePhone is Lenovo’s attempt to enter the smartphone game. Late last year, the repurchased their Lenovo Mobile division after they sold it off to get some cash-on-hand during the economic recession. Lenovo Mobile primarily has made low-end featurephones, but they hope to change that around with the LePhone.

Lenovo is planning to release the social networking-centric LePhone in it’s home China next month, but they recently held an event to promote the phone a bit. It’ll be an Android phone with a bit of a unique clamshell design and a QWERTY keyboard interrupted by a four-way D-pad in the middle.

The LePhone will have it’s own custom UI (like many Android phones we’ve seen, IE – MOTOBLUR, HTC Sense) which has been described by those who saw it as “four-leaf clover” like, with four square icons. Like any Android phone, it’s capable of multitasking, which Lenovo showed off. The IDG News Service reports that a ‘port on the side’ of the phone will let users plug in a larger keyboard or game controller. I suspect the unnamed port is a Mini-USB, but they haven’t said for sure.

All that being said, the exact specs of the device are unknown. We don’t know what processor it will have, or how much RAM – things like that. It will run on China’s CDMA 3G bands, which unfortunately, will make it incompatible with the rest of the world (bad news for those hoping to import the phone).

Lenovo has tapped 500 developers to create Android apps for their phone, with 200 developers who have tweaked their apps just for the LePhone. Probably due to the poor relations between Google and China, the LePhone will come with none of the regular Google apps that you’d find on most Android phones elsewhere in the world (expect those on AT&T). Instead, Lenovo is going with apps from Chinese search giant Baidu.

Pricing or the possibility of a release outside China were not disclosed by Lenovo. They expect to sell “millions” of LePhones in the next five years.

What do you think about the LePhone? Do you like how it looks? Would you buy it if it came to your country?