Lava launches iris 501 smartphone with 5-inch display

Lava International has announced the launch of its latest smartphone, the Lava iris 501. The iris 501 has a 1Ghz Dual Core processor and sports 5-inch capacitive multi-touch screen with a resolution of 800 x 400.

The iris 501 runs Android 4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and makes navigation simple, interactive and customisable. The phone has a 5MP rear and VGA front camera too.

Here are the key features of Lava Iris 501:
5.0-inch WVGA Screen with a 800 x 400 resolution
1GHz dual core processor
Android Ice-cream Sandwich (v4.0.4)
Dual SIM
3G with video calling
5.0 MP Auto-Focus / 0.3 MP front camera
4GB memory card free

The iris 501 comes with built in apps like Saavn Music Player, Fusion Music organiser and games like Asphalt HD from Gameloft, Cricket Fever, Saving Private Sheep, Shark Dash and Little Big City.

The phone also comes with the Hike app for free messaging. The app supports multi-platform messaging and offers 100 free SMSes per month to be sent ot users not using the app; it also supports group chat, file transfer and location sharing.

Back in April last year, Lava International had launched a high-end smartphone based on Intel’s brand new Medfield Atom processors called the Lava X900. The phone was a part of the XOLO line of phones.

The phone was priced at Rs. 22,000 and was to pose competition to Motorola Atrix 2 and HTC Sensation. The X900 sports a 4.03-inch display with a rather high resolution of 1024 x 600, thereby lending it a pixel count of 297ppi. The TFT LCD display also features Corning’s Gorilla Glass. It measures around 10.9 mm thick with a weight of 127 g. The phone also features a quad band GSM and 3G phone with support for HSPA+. An 8MP auto-focus shooter with an LED flash is also onboard.

The highlight of this phone was the new Medfield CPU from Intel, the Z2460. Based on the 32nm fabrication process, the Z2460 SoC features a single core CPU running at 1.6GHz along with the usual Intel features such as HyperThreading and Burst Performance Technology (or TurboBoost).

The graphics card on the phone is PowerVR SGX540 GPU, which clocked at 400MHz. There was also support for 1080p video playback and recording. Intel baked heavily on its new Smart Idle Technology for better battery life than its competitors and it paid off well. This feature also allowed the CPU core and rest of the processor to switch off while the OS was still functioning.

The phone was initially shipped with Android 2.3 Gingerbread, but received an Android version 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update back in October last year.