The 3G iFive Mini 3 That Never Was

I was going through my bookmarks for posts about Five Technology and came across two reports I’d forgotten all about.

These are from mid-October at the Hong Kong Electronics Fair. Five Technology was displaying a Mini 3 model they never released and never mentioned again [Google Translate, Google Translate]:

A render with a light back and plastic endcaps. Wild!

And it existed as a demonstration model. Notice the lack of the iFive skin:

Given that big flap in the render, you’d think it would be using the Huawei UltraStick. But no. It’s hiding a conventional SIM slot:

At the time the original news items were published, this was to use Android 4.1 with a Qualcomm CPU.

Given that months have since passed without it showing up on Five’s own site, I have to wonder if technical or market issues prevented its release.