Philips and Alibaba team up to launch flagship YunOS phone with 2K display


Philips i966

Philips’ smartphones have generally been well designed up low-end products, but the new Philips i966 phone with YunOS shows that they can do flagship phones too.

In the past we have always been impressed with the design of Philips phones, but never the hardware of the pricing, but this time around we had to take notice. The Philips i966 is the first real flagship from the company and the first flagship phone to boast Alibaba’s YunOS 3.0 (based on Android).

Specifications are well above what we had expected, with a 5.5-inch 2K, 534pp display, 2.5Ghz Snapdragon 801 processor, 3GB RAM and 32GB internal memory. There is also a good-sized 3000mAh battery, 8 mega-pixel front camera and impressive Sony 20.7 megapixel rear camera with F1.8 aperture. Of course LTE is part of the package, plus dual SIM support.

Philips i966 image gallery

Philips are also claiming that the glass panel on the Philips i966 is the first to be curved to the all edges of the body. Press images also seem to show a rear mounted fingerprint scanner.

Philips will begin selling their beast of a phone on November 1st, a few weeks ahead of the Meizu MX4 Pro launch which should also come with the option to run YunOS.

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11 Comments

  1. Atomicrus
    October 20, 2014

    So fat and ugly. I miss those days when phone makers had balls in making new forms and style, no matter how strange it was

    • desponent
      October 20, 2014

      Those were the days when fat and ugly was the norm so I’m not sure what you’re talking about.

    • Marco Lancaster
      October 20, 2014

      I can’t measure the thickness, but if going to be less than 1cm I’m okay. The only thing I guess is ugly on design is the black bar with the capacitive buttons, on-screen would play a better role at all.

  2. Quirly
    October 20, 2014

    What is YunOs compared with Android exactly?
    Can we use it in Europe? Does it support other languages than chinese, too?
    LTE-frequenzes?

    • October 20, 2014

      LTE details haven’t been announced. YunOS is basically Android with all Google services removed. It is designed for the Chinese market, but I’m sure there is a way to install Google services again

    • njren
      October 20, 2014

      YunOS is basically targeted at Alibaba power users with all of their services fully integrated. It also attempts to replicate what Google is doing with cloud computing, albeit in China and harnessing Alibaba’s massive server capacity. There’s little attraction for anyone outside China.

  3. Dr Solom
    October 20, 2014

    Price???

  4. October 20, 2014

    if the guys at xda can port cm to this or pa it could be an awesome phone, regarding being fat and ugly, I feel for manufacturers we keep saying I wish they would make (the thin) phones a bit fatter to give a decent size battery, yet when they do people slate the designs…