iPhone ELITE Concept
iPhone ELITE concept, designed by Mat Brady, comes with optional slide out keyboard and front-facing camera that enables video conferencing. [link]
Well, what do we have here? Yep, that’s the Motorola i465, the first iDEN phone with a full QWERTY keyboard in the entire universe in a seemingly official press shot. Mobile Review’s somehow gotten ahold of this slick piece of photography, which shows the dumbphone off in a much better light than we’ve previously seen. We still don’t know much else about the specs, or when this Sprint-Nextel bound puppy will show up.
It takes a awful lot of ingenuity and creativity — and maybe just a touch of dumb luck — to come up with a unique, truly innovative phone form factor in the year 2009. Somehow, LG and Verizon have managed to hit that rare combo with the Versa, a full touchscreen bar that can be augmented with add-on modules for those times when function takes priority over form. Right now, the only module available is a full QWERTY keyboard — a good first choice, we’d say — and it’s included with the package. Cool concept, yeah, but is it usable? Read on.
There was a bit of a false alarm at the flagship stores yesterday — Nokia’s New York and Chicago stores got inventory, but didn’t start selling the 5800 right away, causing much anguish in the hearts of American plectrum lovers and our very own Chris Ziegler. Well, all has been rectified, and now you can pick up Nokia’s touchscreen pioneer, the 5800 XpressMusic, for $399, unlocked and unsubsidized. If you aren’t so much into retail stores you can head to Nokia’s online store, though the phone is still inexplicably listed as “pre-order” there — we’re sure things will be rectified soon enough.
Two month ago we saw Gresso unveiling its Avantgarde Skeleton Windows Mobile smartphone. Now we have a new special edition device is joining the family called the Skeleton Gold phone.
Basically, the new device is identical to the original Avantgarde Skeleton, sporting 2 megapixel camera, media player, QVGA screen, 2GB of internal memory, Windows Mobile 6.0 Standard edition (again, why not WinMo 6.1?), as well as that transparent sapphire glass back panel.
The twist is in the materials used, and as you can guess for yourself, this one is dressed in more gold — its 23 functional keys are “executed of 18k gold,” while the screen is protected by hand-polished 42k sapphire glass.
Finally, and I see this as a sign of recession hitting even companies like Gresso — even though the new model is the “Gold” one, it’s cheaper than the Avantgarde Skeleton. The Gresso Skeleton Gold is available for $4,400 (about 3,450 EUR) in a 50-unit limited edition. In retrospect, the Gresso Avantgarde Skeleton retailed for 4,000 EUR. Any ideas?
Vertu is out with yet another special edition of its Constellation series. It’s called Pure and unlike other devices from the series, these are made out of steel, leather and ceramics. The price, however, remains steep and the Nokia’s luxury arm will be selling these for 6,800 EUR or about $8,574. Three color options are available, including white, black and silver — each of which will be available in a limited series of 2,500 units.
And we thought recession is on? Guess finding 7,500 people shouldn’t be that hard, even in these times…
This one we’ve missed during the Mobile World Congress. Aside from unveiling a range of powerful devices at the event, Samsung also announced the GT-S5600, an affordable touchscreen phone. There’s no doubts this baby will compete head-to-head with LG’s Cookie aka KP500, appealing to those who dig the “touch idea,” yet don’t want to spend fortunes on a handset.
Unfortunately, we don’t have much details at this stage. There’s some camera on board, Bluetooth, media player and Samsung’s own TouchWiz user interface. Exact release date is also unknown, but we’ve heard the Korean giant intends to push this baby to the market as soon as possible. We’ll be watching closely, have no doubts about it…