PRIME series F-04B

Separation benefits

TRUST Japan, the land of fictitious, combinable (“gattai”, they call it) robots, to come up with an idea like the DoCoMo-branded, Fujitsu-made PRIME series F-04B — reportedly the world’s first separable phone.

At first blush, the F-04B looks like a typical touchscreen phone with a stowedaway numeric keypad. Slide the keypad out and you’ll see a handsome 12.2-megapixel autofocus camera great for macro shots with its shallow depth-of-field performance.

The “separable” part comes in when you want to multi-task. Hit the catch located at the base of the F-04B and it detaches itself into two halves that communicate with each other via Bluetooth.

The top half houses the 3.4-inch touchscreen, camera, speakers and storage for videos and pictures. The bottom half functions as a standalone handset, consisting of a full Qwerty keyboard (normally concealed in “gattai” mode), keypad, speakers and a mouthpiece.

The idea here is to let users surf the Internet, read their email or watch videos on the display unit, while chatting away in a voice call on the keyboard unit.

Alternatively, the keyboard unit serves as a remote control to the main display unit. The latter can function as a mini television set with its built-in One-Seg tuner — a standard Japanese phone feature that lets users tune in to free-to-air television — or a camera that you can set up on a ledge. With the 0.32-megapixel front-facing camera, users can do video conferencing, too — except they can choose to output the sound only to the keyboard unit.

You can connect the display unit to the optional F01 handheld projector peripheral (priced at an estimated US$200) to output video content — including TV,PowerPoint presentations and games —up to 66 inches on a wall.

With two sets of hardware keys, a touchscreen, two cameras, two sets of speakers, GPS and an  accelerometer, this well-endowed phone is also primed for gaming, as evidenced by the huge library of games installed in the demo unit.

Unfortunately, NTT DoCoMo said that there are no plans to bring the F-04B outside of Japan, likely due to the fact that it runs on DoCoMo’s proprietary mobile Internet platform, i-Mode. The phone retails for about US$600 ($840) in Japan.
Sim Cheng Kai

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