NEC Announces World’s First Water-Cooled Smartphone
NEC has some pretty crazy ideas when it comes to smartphone design — as we discovered when we checked out the dual-screen Medias W at Mobile World Congress back in February. And its latest offering is just as outlandish.
Meet the Medias X 06E — the world’s first smartphone with a water-cooled CPU.
From the outside, the Medias X 06E looks like your average smartphone. In fact, it kind of looks like a low-budget device you might see from an unknown Chinese manufacturer — certainly not one carrying cutting-edge cooling technology.
But under the hood, this handset has a water-filled pipe that runs alongside its 1.7GHz quad-core processor and promises to make the handset cooler than competing smartphones. NEC’s infographic (below) illustrates how much cooler the Medias X 06E is when in use.
While I commend NEC for delivering something new — and not just creating cheaper alternatives to Samsung’s super successful Galaxy devices — I have to wonder whether we really need water-cooled smartphones.
Sure, our devices get warm, but they don’t get hot enough to pose any real issues to their users. So water-cooled smartphones just seem like a bit of a gimmick to me.
Aside from the water-cooled CPU, the Medias X 06E offers a 4.7-inch 720p OLED display, and a 13.1-megapixel rear-facing camera. The handset will make its debut in Japan on NTT Docomo in June. There’s no word on international availability just yet.
