Pepsi Is Getting In The Mobile Phone Business

Could a soft drink maker make a splash in the mobile phone world? Pepsi may be about to find out.

The United Kingdom’s Daily Mail confirmed Monday (Oct. 12) that Pepsi is bringing a smartphone to market, with a series of leaked specs and images for the Android handset — titled for now as the Pepsi P1 — prompting the admission to the paper. Pepsi said a “line of mobile phones and accessories” will bow in China within just a few months, and despite no formal plans to enter the smartphone market, Pepsi told the Daily Mail that it will launch in China in a way akin to previous forays into the country that focused on apparel and accessories.

[bctt tweet=” Could a soft drink maker make a splash in the mobile phone world? Pepsi may be about to find out.”]

Among the features to be included: a 5.5-inch screen, a fingerprint scanner and a camera sporting as many as 13 megapixels. No official details have been released by PepsiCo itself, though other sites have cited dimensions that could find the P1 running Android 5.1 Lollipop, with the screen at 1080p. Allegedly, the phone will have a 1.7GHz processor, as much as two gigabytes of RAM, 16GB of storage and a 3,000 milliamp-hour battery, the Daily Mail said, and come complete with a fingerprint sensor, with leaked pictures indicating a rear location for that tech feature and physical buttons to be located beneath the device’s screen.

Other sites, the Daily Mail reported, show a metal shell, and Chinese news reports state that the handset will be unveiled in Beijing later this month, with availability within a few months and a retail price of roughly $206.

If it does bring a new device to market, Pepsi may face a slowing Chinese arena, where data from May showed that the smartphone market dipped for the first time in several years. And new players, such as Xiaomi, have been coming in as well.

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