Marshall Turns Towards The Mobile Industry, Creates Its First Handset
Marshall is a famed company that is known worldwide to music geeks and guitar pros as one of the best guitar amp companies. With nearly 50 years of wisdom and experience in the audio world, the company is now moving on to the world of mobiles.
The new Marshall smartphone is an Android handset that is specially designed for music lovers. The device has been installed with very simple specs, including a 4.7-inches 720p display with Gorilla Glass 3, 2GB RAM, a removable 2,500mAh battery and a Snapdragon 410 processor and a Qualcomm MSM8916 with Wolfson WM8281 Audio Hub chipset. Moto E uses the same processor to power their system. The Marshall phone also has LTE connectivity. Camera details include an 8MP rear camera with flash and 2MP front camera. It offers 16GB of internal storage that can be expanded to 128GB via a microSD card.
But Marshall is all about music. It has an additional processor that is dedicated to high-resolution FLAC music files. It has two pairs of headphone jacks and a pair of good-looking Marshall Earphones. The button mounted on top of the device fires up the phone’s music UI, a 5-band global equalizer and a scroll wheel for adjusting the volume, without needing to take the phone out of your pocket.
The phone has not been officially announced in the U.S. yet—it will be in a few hours according to the Marshall Swedish site’s countdown clock. There is no pricing information on the U.S. version of the site, as yet.
Hardware differentiation and specialization are evolving trends in the smartphone universe—we have “luxury” phones from Vertu and Lamborghini, a smartphone with a large image sensor from Panasonic, and Samsung’s wrap-around Edge screen Dual headphone jacks and hi-res audio capabilities seem like features that may become mainstream, soon.
