China’s first rugged, water resistant Android smartphone launched!

If you, like me were totally uninterested in the above title until you came across ‘Rugged’ then congratulations you are as awesome as I am!

For those of you who don’t know who Qihoo are (Qihoo 360) are a software company that make virus scanners found on the majority of Window’s PC’s in China, and Haier are one of China’s largest electronics and white goods makers.

The two companies have joined forces to produce the phone shown above which is known as the “Battleship” and claims to be water resistant, knock and impact resistant and have a scratch 4.5 inch Gorilla glass screen.

We like to think the collaboration sprang up after one of Qihoo 360’s employs accidentally placed his phone in a Haier washing machine containing hunting knives, but we can’t be sure of that. [embedtweet text=”Tweet This!” tweet=”China launches super cheap rugged Android phone! https://www.gizchina.com/?p=10362″]

As well as being a rugged 4.5 inch smartphone the Haier Battleship is also marked as China’s fastest Android smartphone priced below 3000 Yuan, actually the price is quite a bit lower than that with Battleship costing just 1888 RMB ($299) for the first 10,000 buyers (after that it goes up 1999 RMB, roughly $317).

Actually the specification is pretty good for the price as it features Android ICS 4.0 OS, an 8 mega pixel rear camera which can film 720p HD video and of course features Qihoo 360’s own anti-virus software.