ITG Announced First Windows 8 smartphone named as "XPPhone 2"



Last year around this time, ITG released its first xpPhone. That phone ran Windows Embedded Standard 2009, but this time, the company has decided to step it up a bit. The xpPhone 2 will run Windows 7 (at first) and will be upgradable to Windows 8 whenever it's released.

The second iteration of ITG's UMPC/smartphone hybrid has some pretty decent specs, especially in comparison to the Fujitsu LOOX F-07C that I reviewed last week. For starters, the new xpPhone will sport a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530 processor, 2GB of RAM, and up to 112GB of SSD storage space. All of those specs are wrapped nicely under a 4.3-inch display in a body that is slimmer than the original.

Like with most awesome pieces of hardware like this, we haven't heard anything about pricing or exact release dates; it'll simply be sometime in January. As for price, I'd say to expect it to be somewhere around the range of the previous device: $750-$850 sounds plausible to me.

The F-07C was a pretty good UMPC, even with its lower specs. I predicted that there might be some awesome devices coming because of Windows 8, and since the new xpPhone has better specs, I think that prediction might just come true.

ITG is also planning on offering Windows 7 on the xpPhone 2; depending on the timing of the phone's release, as well as when Microsoft finishes-up work on Windows 8, perhaps we'll see the xpPhone 2 first arrive running Windows 7, with an upgrade later available. There's no word yet on price, but this one feels like it's not going to be cheap.

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