The popular Mountaineering sports brand Quechua has teamed up with Archos and produced a 5-inch super rugged smartphone that’s perfect for anybody with an active outdoor lifestyle. The handset is resistant to shock, mud, water, sand, snow and extremely cold temperatures.

Strangely, the phone hasn’t yet been associated with a specific name or model number, so for now it’s being referred to as “Quecha’s rugged 5-inch Android-powered smartphone.” The handset is relatively impressive, packing a 5-inch HD display, a 1.2GHz quad-core processor on a Qualcomm chipset, 1GB of DDR3 RAM, a 5-megapixel reinforced rear-facing camera, 4GB of internal memory (expandable up to 32GB via microSD) and a beefy 3,500 mAh non-removable battery.

“This launch from an observation that we could do it ourselves with our customers, the supply of smartphones is indeed bloated, yet there is no device on the market truly suitable for the practice of hiking and the outdoors ,”says Christian Ollier, director of the Quechua brand.

In addition, the smartphone will ship running the latest build of “Vanilla” Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, combined with the full suite of Google apps, including; Gmail, Google Play, Google+, Hangouts, YouTube, Maps, Facebook and Twitter. Also, with regards to connectivity, the handset sports 3G HSPA, Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, A-GPS and a microUSB port.

Quechua’s rugged smartphone is currently priced at €230 ($313), however, at this precise moment in time there’s no word on the handset’s availability. So be sure to check back for more information.

• SourceLinformaticien