Panasonic enters the smartphone market in Europe this spring with The Eluga, a 4.3-inch smartphone with a 960×540 resolution and NFC support.

Photo: The Eluga, from www.theverge.com

The company introduced the phone at the Panasonic Convention 2012. Scheduled to appear in Europe in March, it is to be waterproof, dustproof, and extremely thin and light-weight.

In December 2011, Panasonic showed the prototype of the phone. The visual characteristics of The Eluga look similar to the prototype. The Eluga will be the first Panasonic phone to debut outside of Japan since 2005. The price of the phone is not disclosed.

The Verge says, that Panasonic has told them in an official mail that The Eluga weighs only 103 grams with a thickness of 7.8mm. It features 8GB of onboard memory, an 8MP camera, and a dual-core 1GHz processor. It only has Android 2.3, not the new 4.0, but Panasonic plans to update to Ice Cream Sandwich in summer 2012.

The NFC technology allows contactless transactions, data exchange, and simplified setup of more complex communications such as Wi-Fi. More and more brands now leverage the possibilities of NFC. For instance, Nokia launched an NFC-based taxi booking app in Taiwan last year, while Google continues to develop its Google Wallet.