Hisense has finally answered the 3G call with its new T68 cell phone, which has made its first appearance at the HITECH 2008 Fair in China. Along with 3G compatibility, the phone also supports the Chinese TD-SCDMA network. Although Hisense has made its name in China with its top of the class electronic appliances, it is yet to make a mark in the cell phone industry and if they assume that the T68 is the ticket, it definitely isn’t. Other than 3G support, the T68 is pretty much any other candy bar out there with dual-band GSM capability, 2.4-inch TFT touchscreen display with handwriting recognition, music/video players, and microSD support. The camera of choice integrated is a 1.3 megapixeller with no information on the kind of flash included. The battery is a whopper though with 1300 mAh which can power the device up to 7.5 hours of talktime or a staggering 270 hours on standby.

As of now, the Hisense T68 is only available in China at a price of 1800 Yuan ($260), with no information of a future release date in other markets.

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I promised you a lot more “first evers” didn’t I? Here’s one more. The first ever mirasol-enabled cell phone. Produced by Hisense, the C108 is a light-weight, ultra-low-power candy bar with a 1.2-inch mirasol display featuring a resolution of 128×96 pixels. It uses Qualcomm’s QSC6010 chipset and has 32MB of ROM and 8MB of memory. The phone will be on display at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona if you want to take a peek.

For the uninitiated, mirasol is a new reflective display technology developed by Qualcomm that “harnesses ambient light and require no backlighting, thereby consuming significantly less power. The reflective mirasol display also automatically scales to the surrounding lighting conditions, allowing users to see their content in almost every environment, even bright sunlight.” Incidentally, the Audiovox ARWH1 Stereo Bluetooth Headset was the first product to actually feature a mirasol display.

Other than that, the phone seems pretty limited and the only major feature seems to be its multi-language support. This one is heading to China and other emerging markets later on in 2008.

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