Pantech announces touch-wheel music phone

Pantech released a new slider cell phone in Hong Kong today, and it looks a lot like a very famous portable music player. The PG 3600V features a 260,000-color TFT display, a music player (supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, and WMA file formats), a 1.3-megapixel camera, an MPEG-4 video recorder, a speakerphone, stereo Bluetooth, text and multimedia messaging, e-mail, 512MB of internal memory, and an external memory-card slot for additional storage. Plus, it comes with a built-in video-editing application for on-the-go clip manipulation. Emulating the iPod, it even comes complete with a touch-wheel sensor in the middle for tracking songs, zooming in on images, tracking movies, and navigating the menu. It isn't the first cell phone to copy the aesthetic of the Apple music player, however. The , which we first showed at the CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas this year, also has a similar Click Wheel design, though the wheel on the 550 isn't touch sensitive.

While we don't know if the PG 3600V will ever make its way stateside, we can still admire it from afar. We'll let you know if our sister site on CNET Asia reviews it.