LEITZ PHONE 1 – The first smartphone designed by Leica
Introducing the Leitz Phone 1 to the Japanese market, the first smartphone to combine uncompromising quality, peerless optical engineering, and imaging software mastery with iconic Leica design. The Leitz-Phone 1 enables you to capture and share personal moments of everyday life with pictures of unique Leica quality.
Named after Leica’s founder and tribute to Ernst Leitz (II), who revolutionised the world of photography in 1924 with the invention of modern 35mm photography. The Leitz Phone 1 has the world-famous Leica camera experience at its heart allowing you to concentrate entirely on adapting the essentials of photography to everyday life.
A new milestone in Leica’s history, it underlines their reputation for the highest quality in technical innovation.
Designed by Leica’s own design studio in Germany, the Leitz Phone 1 follows our commitment to reducing to the essentials with clear, minimal, and intuitive handling characteristics. Crafted from the highest quality materials as signalled by the Leica logo, its aluminium case in anodised silver is elegantly combined with matt-black Gorilla-glass.
The highest degree of technical precision is seen in sophisticated details like the knurled edges of the phone which keep it secure, even in wet conditions.
The iconic Leica lens cap, to protect the lens, is held in place magnetically, demonstrating the functional and beautiful Leica design philosophy.
The simplicity and high-end finish of the silicon case provides protection against dust and moisture with the refined aesthetics you know and expect from Leica.
The handling is a source of intense pleasure. The Leitz Phone 1 is intuitive and easy to understand. As our entire product portfolio, it allows complete concentration on the subject, without having to battle with the camera’s settings. Giving you the possibility to focus on taking better picture, worrying less about options and settings. Nothing more and nothing less.
A fast f/1.9 lens and up to 6-fold digital zoom, the integrated Leica lens technology of the Leitz Phone 1 delivers brilliant pictures in RAW and JPEG formats that impress with high quality and true-to-life detail, especially in large-format prints. The equivalent of 19mm focal length in full-frame allows an extraordinary wide field of view for immersive composition and breath-taking views.
Featuring an extraordinarily powerful 1-inch image sensor with 20.2 megapixels paired with a Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 888 processor 5G mobile platform. The sensor size allows the Leitz Phone 1 to capture more light and produce brilliant image quality that is unsurpassed within the smartphone industry.
As with all Leica cameras, The Leitz Phone 1 embodies their passion for concentrating on the essentials: ‘Das Wesentliche’, and the essential element of photography is the image. Based on our experience for more than 100 years, Leica’s proven optical engineering know-how ensures top grade lens design combined with the aid of long-standing Leica optical and signal processing expertise. Every image taken with the Leitz Phone 1 reflects the essence of Leica image quality and is testimony to Leica’s unparalleled optical capability and image software expertise.
Leica’s proprietary software engine, the “Leitz Engine”, brings state-of-the-art computational bokeh, colour correction, edge refinement and realistic noise reduction to smartphone photography.
The “Leitz Looks” mode has been developed by Leica engineers and delivers extraordinarily sharp black-and-white images with a typical Leica camera look-and-feel, based on the visual language of the flagship Leica M Monochrom. Even more Leitz Looks will be made available with later firmware updates.
A pre-installed “LFI.Widget” presents constantly the best photos from the Leica Fotografie International Gallery – the curated platform for Leica photographers worldwide. Depending on personal taste and interest, the selection of categories as well as the frequency of the refresh of new images can be configured individually.
Availability
The Leitz Phone 1 is produced exclusively for the Japanese market in collaboration with Sharp Corporation and is available from SoftBank, Japan’s leading distributor of information and communications technology.
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Joanne Carter
Joanne Carter, creator of the world’s most popular mobile photography and art website— TheAppWhisperer.com— TheAppWhisperer platform has been a pivotal cyberspace for mobile artists of all abilities to learn about, to explore, to celebrate and to share mobile artworks. Joanne’s compassion, inclusivity, and humility are hallmarks in all that she does, and is particularly evident in the platform she has built. In her words, “We all have the potential to remove ourselves from the centre of any circle and to expand a sphere of compassion outward; to include everyone interested in mobile art, ensuring every artist is within reach”, she has said. Promotion of mobile artists and the art form as a primary medium in today’s art world, has become her life’s focus. She has presented lectures bolstering mobile artists and their art from as far away as the Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea to closer to her home in the UK at Focus on Imaging. Her experience as a jurist for mobile art competitions includes: Portugal, Canada, US, S Korea, UK and Italy. And her travels pioneering the breadth of mobile art includes key events in: Frankfurt, Naples, Amalfi Coast, Paris, Brazil, London. Pioneering the world’s first mobile art online gallery - TheAppWhispererPrintSales.com has extended her reach even further, shipping from London, UK to clients in the US, Europe and The Far East to a global group of collectors looking for exclusive art to hang in their homes and offices. The online gallery specialises in prints for discerning collectors of unique, previously unseen signed limited edition art. Her journey towards becoming The App Whisperer, includes (but is not limited to) working for a paparazzi photo agency for several years and as a deputy editor for a photo print magazine. Her own freelance photographic journalistic work is also widely acclaimed. She has been published extensively both within the UK and the US in national and international titles. These include The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Popular Photography & Imaging, dpreview, NikonPro, Which? and more recently with the BBC as a Contributor, Columnist at Vogue Italia and Contributing Editor at LensCulture. Her professional photography has also been widely exhibited throughout Europe, including Italy, Portugal and the UK. She is currently writing several books, all related to mobile art and is always open to requests for new commissions for either writing or photography projects or a combination of both. Please contact her at: [email protected]
