Sharp’s Aquos phones don’t usually leave Japan, which is a shame considering they’re usually a sight to behold. The company may inadvertently be breaking that trend with its latest phone, the Aquos R2 Compact.
The word “Compact” in the name is fitting, since it’s a phone with a 5.2-inch form factor – tiny by today’s standards. But it comes with a design that people may take issue with, especially among those who dislike notches. This is because this phone comes with not one, but two notches – one for the 8MP front-facing camera, and the other for the phone’s fingerprint scanner cum home button.
Odd design aside, it comes with a mishmash of hardware specs which is incongruent, given the way phone tiers work. Off the bat, we’ve got a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC, a Full HD+ display, 4GB of LPDDR4X RAM, 64GB of internal storage, a 2500mAh battery and a 22.6MP f/1.9 main camera.
From our point of view, it’s difficult to be enthusiastic about this phone. It also begs the question over what exactly Sharp is hoping to achieve by the design of the R2 Compact.
The Sharp Aquos R2 Compact is slated for availability in Japan sometime during the middle of January. There’s no price as of yet, but it likely wouldn’t matter unless you want to import it in from Japan anyway.
