Motorola i886 to be the first non-touch Android

On the surface the Motorola i886 iDEN might seem like just another rugged Motorola phone but as Phone Scoop found out after a brief hands-on, turns out the i886 is running Android, which is surprising since the phone does not have a touchscreen and also because the manufacturer seems to have forgotten to mention this anywhere. This makes the i886 possibly the first Android phone to not have a touchscreen.

The guys at Phone Scoop failed to mention what version of Android the phone was running but they noticed that it lacked many of the standard Android applications that one would expect. This was natural considering most of them are optimized to be used with a touchscreen and hence won t work properly with just a D-pad. Also, as you would expect, there is no access to Android Market. It does support Java application with the help of a J2ME virtual machine.

Now some may question the need to have Android on a phone with no touchscreen but think about it this way. Would you rather have Motorola s proprietary OS over Android? Even without the touchscreen support and applications the OS would still be better than what you find on most feature phones.

The Motorola i886 iDEN is available exclusively for Sprint.