Marshall's first smartphone cranks the volume up to 11

[Shawn Knight]

Renowned guitar amplifier maker Marshall is going mobile. The England-based company on Thursday announced an Android-powered (Lollipop) smartphone designed for music lovers.

The Marshall London features a 4.7-inch 720p IPS display that’s powered by a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 401 SoC clocked at 1.2GHz alongside 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage (expandable via SD card).

The handset also includes an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera, a 2-megapixel shooter up front and a 2,500mAh removable battery. As you can tell, this is a lower-end smartphone in terms of sheer processing power and the like although it does have LTE connectivity, something that’s often missing in budget-minded smartphones.

What it lacks in power, however, it more than makes up for on the music end. The phone has two large speaker grills on the front, dual microphones, dual headphone jacks up top, gold-colored accents and a faux-leather finish on the rear. A physical button across the top edge of the phone takes users straight to their music collection.

The handset was built in collaboration with Finnish design firm Creoir whose previous clients include Jolla and Nokia. It looks like an extension of the company’s popular amplifiers which should resonate with diehard music fans.

Under the hood is a Wolfson DSP (digital signal processor) which, combined with the two headphone jacks and included bespoke DJ app, lets aspiring DJs mix their own tunes right on the phone. Other software tricks include a music app aggregator that brings together all of your music sources, a global equalizer and support for FLAC files.

The Marshall London is slated to go on sale August 21 priced at $499/£399 which also includes a set of Marshall Mode in-ear headphones.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/61399-marshall-first-smartphone-cranks-volume-up-11.html

 

[Guest]

LMAO hard at the pricing.

 

[Guest]

Didn't they say it was a low budget phone?!

 

[Skidmarksdeluxe]

It's a very niche product. It has to be with specs like those at that price.

 

[Guest]

A price of 4995 SEK is about 535 Euros which isn't massively expensive and is quite a bit less than my daughter paid for her unlocked iphone. Still more than I would pay for any phone though.

 

[Randomthom]

Depending on the quality of the headphones that might be a reasonable price but I'm doubtful!

 

[Kibaruk]

The proc/memory/video specs on this thing are irrelevant, what's important is the audio enhanced hardware, it's priced very reasonable.

 

[Guest]

It is expensive for an smartphone, one, because it will not sell in the millions since it is for a close audience, two because of the high grade audio components. Taking that in account it is a very reasonable price. And is exactly what I'm looking for, a hi-fi audio player that let me use stream services and don't need to carry an extra hi fi audio player, hahaha, but still to expensive for my budget

 

[Wendig0]

Cool looking phone, but that's about it.

 

[Guest]

I would actually pay a lot of money for a phone with an audiophile grade DAC and audiophile grade speakers. As long as the screen is at least 720p and it has good battery life. I'll wait for the reviews on this one.