The FCC is one amazing resource when it comes to getting little details about upcoming devices. While it isn’t the easiest place to navigate, and much of the documents that have to be made public talk a ton of jargon, a person can sometimes stumble upon something ever now and then. Liliputing came across a recently made available series of FCC files for a new Sharp device with a model number of APYHRO00216. That isn’t anything spectacular, but a set of descriptions from Sharp sure are as it is listed as a Dual mode hand held Mini Phablet. We all know the term phablet as it started to spread when Samsung introduces the Note series as well as other devices that seemed to boarder a new tablet size screen on a phone.
I am the definitely not the guy to be reading through these files to pull out anything truely meaningful, but I went a head and clicked about anyways out of curiosity. On one attached file we see the device as having quad-band LTE (B1/ B3/ B19/ B21), and Tri-band WCDMA(FDD I/ VI/XIX) along with Bluetooth, Ant+ W-LAN (Wi-Fi), NFC and GPS. Scrolling through they re-list the device as a tablet with a non-removable battery. The furth down we go we come across the devices dimension and a representation of the device.
So it is a tablet. however, further down the doc they run other tests to do with holding the device to your ear and tilted away from your mouth. I could be wrong, but that indicates it will be a phone too.
There could be more buried in the documents that I didn’t catch that a keen eye might see. Again though, what are we looking at? Well, sometime in October there was talks of a new Sharp tablet coming the first half of 2015. Sharp put out a press release at the time talking about the industries first MEMS-IGZO display Developed and being mounted as a 7-inch tablet. MEMS is short for Micro Electro Mechanical System which is a technology out of Pixtronix, Inc (a subsidiary of Qualcomm) and paired with Sharps IGZO technology the display is supposed to have lower power consumption than traditional LCD displays with better direct light visibility with vivid picture with a mixed Greyscale or Monochrome mode for ultra power savings.
Sad thing is, they state the product will mainly target Japan’s B2B market. At the time of their press release it was listed as an Android 4.4 based tablet with a Qualcomm 800 processor and is IPX5/IPX7 compliant. Much of this information is rather old, minus the FCC filings, so there are still plenty of things that could have changed since October. For instance, the image from the FCC filing lists the Cellular antennae with a “Activate only in Japan” attachment. Sharp could look at making this, or a variant, as a Wi-Fi only model and ship globally.
Source: Liliputing | FCC | Sharp
