World's Thinnest Smartphone? The NEC Medias

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This industry, folks…this industry. Things move so fast, that unless you’re watching everything like a hawk, it just slips right by. But that’s why you come here, for all the latest. And what we’ve got today is a new king of the ring in the ultra-thin smartphone arena. The Sony Ericsson Xpedia Arc is dead…long live the NEC Medias.

And it was a close shave, too–whilst the Xpedia Arc measured in at a super-svelte 8.7 mm, the NEC Medias took a whole extra millimeter off, measuring in at 7.7 mm.

It’s not just a relatively lack of empty space this phone’s packing, either, but rather a lot of interesting features. For instance, the NEC Medias is carrying a four inch display showing at a healthy 854 x 480 resolution, an 800 MHz processor, Android 2.2 (the Froyo variety, not Gingerbread, which is definitely a bit of an eyebrow-raiser), a 5.1 megapixel camera, and a digital (not analog, either, meaning it’ll get the current over the air broadcasts if it’s in range) TV tuner.

A slightly more disturbing question mark in all this is the lack of any information about storage capacity–if it’s got a 5.1 megapixel camera, then surely it’s got to have some way to store the proceeds? Maybe it’s got room for a microSD card, or at the very least, cloud storage via wi-fi or 3G, but there’s no indication of either.

At any rate, the thinning down of cell phones is something of an alarming trend–I’m not alone in seeing these things snap like twigs when you put them in your pocket–but then, does it really matter? Sure, the phone is super thin, but when you consider some of the different styles of cases out there (take a look at the Ballistic line sometime–the first time I saw one of those, my first reaction was to wonder if it was bulletproof), it really doesn’t matter how thin the phone itself is. Besides, this paves the way for flexible OLED cell phones, and that definitely won’t be a bad thing.

Price and availability haven’t been announced yet, so keep it here for the latest.