To be fair, Continental Mobiles diamond-encrusted Nokia N95 is a real bargain at £10,000 ($19,813) when compared to Amosu’s £12,000 alternative, but seriously, real richies should be holding off for the evolutionary N96, anyway. For those with enough cash to care, this particular handset / status symbol packs a Sterling silver front-panel stacked with “4.42ct of brilliant-cut, VS1 quality, color G-H, naturally mined diamonds.” If you’re craving one, you’d better get your order in now, as it takes the British craftspeople crazy enough to sell these things three full weeks to whip one up.

[Via Engadget]

We are still smarting from the apparent cancelation of the fabulously powerful K850 from AT&T 2008 lineup, but as consolation prizes go, the Z750a ain’t bad. That being said, it’s solidly seated in the midrange, which seems like an unusual place for Sony Ericsson’s very first carrier-launched 3G handset for the US to be; the 2 megapixel camera isn’t going to “wow” anyone, and the choice of colorful, ultra-gloss shells definitely limits the phone’s appeal to a certain demographic. (more…)

Okay, we will admit, the first thought on our minds when we saw the BlackBerry 9000 in its natural habitat for the first time was, “that’s it?” RIM’s been taking on increasingly sharp competition as of late — even in its traditional corporate strongholds — and we’d expected and hoped to see something less evolutionary and more revolutionary from these cats. On closer inspection, though, we find that the phone is leaving a very positive second impression.

(Click on above image for full picture, applies to all images in full post.) (more…)

Like the Samsung U740 on Verizon, AT&T’s Nokia N75 is a workhorse that’s been kicking around for a good, long while now. It’s a serviceable S60 device — the very first released with North American UMTS, in fact — but it’s lived its useful shelf life at this point and probably should be put out to pasture, preferably with a few shreds of dignity left intact. It seems AT&T has distinctly different plans for the phone, though, following Verizon’s curious renaming buffoonery by christening the N75 the “Tab Top.” What does “Tab Top” mean, you ask? We’re not totally sure, but AT&T says the feature of the same name “gives you easy access to the most commonly used device functionality without using the menu.” We thought S60’s Active Standby sorta did this already, but hey, if AT&T wants to get all fancy on us and call it Tab Top, more power to ‘em, we guess.

These two bad boys arent about to turn any heads, but hey, that’s not exactly what they were designed to do. Like self-branded Vodafone handsets of days gone by, the 227 and 228 from Vodafone are intended to fill in the lower end of Vodafone’s expansive lineup (if you can really drop a smartphone down into that category, anyway) while name-brand devices occupy every other nook and cranny. To give you an idea of just how low end these particular suckers are, Vodafone’s product pages list “color display” as the only feature of the models other than the form factors themselves. On the upside, they’re free on contract and are available now on some of Vodafone’s European networks, so we guess we don’t have a lot of room to complain.

While HTC didnt arrive with the same kind of horsepower as Sony Ericsson or Samsung, they did manage to squeak one new handset out at the show, the Windows Mobile 6 -powered HTC 3470. It case you missed it, the handset features GPS — while not crystal clear, the press material suggests HTC includes TomTom 6 — quad-band GPRS / EDGE, 256 MB ROM, 128 MB RAM, Bluetooth, and a 1 GB microSD card. Sorry speed freaks, no WiFi or 3G connectivity here, but all the above is piled into a pretty tight container, in fact, it is one of HTC’s smallest sets. Look for this to hit sometime this month on Orange in the UK, France, Spain and the Netherlands for a cool €449 or roughly $650.

Yeah, it could be fake, but if you had to pick one handset to fake up in Photoshop, would this really be it? Seriously? Sprint’s exclusivity agreement on the Centro is just about to expire, undoubtedly opening a floodgate of carriers rushing to pick up the low-end Garnet phone, so if neither Sprint nor AT&T are your carrier, we’d recommend you just hang tight for a bit.

Stay calm, nothing to get too excited about, but Nokia appears to be prepping yet another low-end flip for T-Mobile (we’d have preferred some S60-based superphone here — but then again, we imagine they’d have kept the lid a little tighter on the FCC documents if that’s what was going on). The 2760 is a phone Nokia pushes as an “emerging markets” device — yeah, it’s really low-end — and might be ripe to replace the 6103, rocking a tiny external display, Bluetooth, and VGA camera all wrapped up in a rather plasticky looking shell.

Sony Ericsson banged out three new sets today, and one that immediately caught our eye with its Ericsson T39-esque — with a dash of Z700 — styled flip. The W350i features a 1.3 megapixel shooter, FM Radio, Bluetooth, 14 MB of internal memory plus a 512 MB Memory Stick Micro, and ships in either Electric black, Ice blue, Hypnotic black, or Graphic white — we’ll let you guess which is which. We can expect a W350a variant, which will include 850 MHz GSM in place of the 900 MHz in the W350i version, so the odds of this landing on our shores looks good. The music controls parked outside the flip are a pretty sweet idea, we’re liking what they did with this design and hope that it continues to impress once we get some hands-on time. Of course, if we were forced to nitpick, we might whisper something like: where’s the 3G fellas? Handsets are expected to hit retail channels in Q2 2008 though no word on pricing.

Looks legit enough, doesn’t it? The supposed successor to the E61i has broken cover via this shot of the device — in prototype “EXX” form, no less — being proudly displayed in some lucky son of a gun’s hand. The “E” moniker designates a Nokia smartphone with a business slant, of course, and thanks to a lovely QWERTY board, the E71 seems to be no exception; specs on the E51-ish device are said to be pretty much in line with what we’d expect for a circa-2008 piece, including HSDPA, WiFi, GPS, and a 3.2 megapixel primary cam with a secondary up front for video calling. As for North American 3G, well… as usual, we can only hope. We’re not sure whether this thing will break officially here at CES, but if it does, you’ll be the first to know.

HP’s Oak makes an appearance in the relentless binge of new handset madness that is the Vodafone roadmap. The HP Oak delivers many of the baubles we’ve come to expect from Windows Mobile devices, things like 7.2 Mbps HSDPA, quad-band GSM, qwerty keyboard, a touchscreen, and even GPS have found there way in. Other connectivity options include the almost standard WiFi and Bluetooth, with chatter time listed as 3.5 hours and 360 hours standby. We’re feeling a lot of similarities between this fella and the HTC TyTN II, but the HP gets the puffy rainbow sticker — with prancing Pegasus, of course — for opting to add that ultra-handy dialpad on the front. Oak’s due date is set for September 2008 at roughly $500.

After O2 dropped its Southeast Asian outpost at the side of the road, we weren’t terribly sure whether it’d be able to flourish — let alone survive — without the mothership’s lifeline. Turns out they’re at least giving it the old college try, though, with new models appropriately dubbed “Zinc II” and “Atom V” (notice that the “Xda” branding of old has left the building). We know this courtesy of Expansys’ Hong Kong outpost, which has done us all a favor by posting preorder pages for both devices; we only have renderings at this point, but they look pretty legit and realistic. Both devices feature quadband GSM and triband HSDPA (nice!), 256MB of ROM and 64MB of RAM, integrated FM radio, WiFi, and GPS. The Atom V is the slightly higher end of the two — despite a slightly lower price — thanks to a 3 megapixel cam around back (versus 2 for the Zinc II) and an Intel core clocked 20MHz higher than the Zinc II’s Samsung silicon, though the Zinc II should win some hearts and minds with its semi-automatic sliding QWERTY pad. If Expansys is to be believed, the Atom V will run HK$4,775 (about $612) while the Zinc II will set you back HK$5,305 (about $680) when they’re available