Soft drink maker PepsiCo. is branching out in a new direction with news Monday that it’s about to enter the smartphone business (note: we are not making this up).

According to Reuters, the company is working with a licensing partner to market the Pepsi smartphone, however it won’t be manufacturing the phone itself; the phone will initially go on sale in China and there are no plans yet to offer it for sale in other territories.

A separate report from Mobipicker claims that the phone will be revealed at an event in Beijing October 20.

Specs for the phone, believed to be called the Pepsi P1, are lower end with the device sporting a 5.5-inch 1080p display, 1.7GHZ MT6592 SoC, 2GB of RAM along with 16GB of internal storage; the phone is said to ship with a 13-megapixel rear camera and a 5-megapixel front unit, all coupled with a 3000 mAh battery.

Running Android 5.1 Lollipop, the phone is expected to be sold for RMB1,299 ($205).

It’s not known if the phone will be offered in a variety of colors, and the leaked product spec page (see picture above) would indicate that the base model will ship in white. However there’s always the potential for the phones to embrace coloring from PepsiCo’s line of soft drinks, such as Cherry Pepsi and others.

There are also some suggestions that the Pepsi brand may extend into mobile accessories as well, although at this stage it’s not clear what they entail, but the thought of a Pepsi branded fitness tracker would be both ironic and amusing at the same time.

Differentiation

The Pepsi smartphone isn’t the first time an established, legacy brand has lent its names to products that have nothing to do with the original company. See more recently both Commodore and Kodak, both of whom have pending smartphones using their branding.

Ultimately it’s all about product differentiation in a crowded Android marketplace; as of August there are said to some 1,294 different Android makers. So although it may seem somewhat quirky or strange, at least a Pepsi branded phone will stand out from the crowd, be it in name only.

Of course a Pepsi phone won’t appeal to those who drink Coca-Cola, but who knows, maybe the Atlanta-based soft drink giant might follow Pepsi’s lead and bring out a Coke-branded smartphone to compete in the near future.

Image credit: Aisidi/Weibo/Mobipicker.