Japanese electronics major Sharp on Wednesday announced a new smartphone, the Sharp Aquos S3 Mini in China. The handset has been listed for pre-order on Chinese online store, JD.com for a starting price of CNY 1,599 (roughly Rs 16,500). It is available in Black colour variant only. The Aquos S3 Mini is a mid-range device and sports a rather interesting design. It comes with a rather unusual 17:9 aspect ratio display with a front-facing notch and pretty thin side bezels. Unlike other screen-notch phones, the S3 Mini has a pretty small screen notch that houses the front selfie camera alone. The bottom bezel is pretty thick to accommodate the physical home screen button cum fingerprint scanner.
Sharp’s Aquos S3 Mini sports a glass and metal design on the front with 5.5-inch Full HD+ TFT display. It offers a screen resolution of 2040 x 1080 pixels along with 17:9 screen aspect ratio. The LCD is bright at 550 nits and with high colour fidelity. Under the hood, the device is powered by an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 630 SoC clocked at 2.2GHz, coupled with 6GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 64GB storage. The storage can further be expanded up to 128GB with the microSD card slot.
In optics department, the S3 Mini packs a single 16MP primary rear sensor with f/2.0 aperture, PDAF, HDR and LED flash. On the front, there is 20MP f/2.0 aperture sensor that comes loaded with AI portrait shots and Beauty Mode.
A 3,020mAh non-removable battery with 5V/2A charging fuels the smartphone. The device provides charging over the Type-C USB port. The dual-SIM (nano) Sharp Aquos S3 Mini runs Android 7.1.1 Nougat out-of-the-box.
As for connectivity, there is Bluetooth, GPS, USB Type-C with OTG, Wi-Fi, and 4G LTE. However, there is no 3.5mm headphone jack on the smartphone. The phone also supports facial recognition technology using the front camera, and as well there is fingerprint scanner embedded below the home button.
The Sharp AQUOS S3 Mini measures 142.7 x 73 x 7.8mm and weighs 140 grams. It’s available for pre-order on JD.com at CNY 1,600 and will be available starting March 30.
