Four new designer phones from DoCoMo

DoCoMo briefly stopped shooting itself in the foot yesterday afternoon to release four new phones, three of which were produced in collaboration with independent designers. The Sharp SH702iD and NEC N702iD handsets share a similar thin, squared-off shape that apes the kind of design ethic we've seen in KDDI's designer phones. That's not to say we don't like the visuals, though; we're particularly fond of the long, thin subdisplay running the length of the N702iD, and its revolutionary use of normal colour designations (red, black, silver and white) rather than the usual verbose descriptions (kudos also to the SH702i for coming in British Green, though). The Sharp is also the lightest phone we've seen in a while, at a paltry 89g.

The Sharp and NEC phones don't overdose on the features, but they do both have music players and come with PC software for transferring tunes; the NEC handset seems to win out on this front by eschewing the DRM of the SD-Music standard used for the Sharp unit.

The Fujitsu F702iD has a more rounded shape that's perhaps not as striking, though it makes up with a range of features common to the higher-end handsets -- including the Suica mobile payment/train pass system, a PDF viewer, fingerprint sensor, and so forth.

The P702i -- the only non-designer handset in the range -- comes off looking rather dowdy in comparison with its peers, though as compensation it does include DoCoMo's push-to-talk technology.

All of these are out on February 24 in Japan.

[Via K-Tai Watch (Japanese)]

Posted by aragoto at February 17, 2006 10:42 AM | TrackBack