Photos: Hands on with the Porsche P'9521 phone
You own a Porsche car, you've got a Porsche pipe and a Porsche mug. So how else can you advertise your mid-life crisis? How about a Porsche phone?
No, you're not imagining things. Porsche Design has made a mobile phone and it's not just a piece of rubbish with a Porsche logo on it -- it is in fact a rather nifty clamshell handset.
Crafted out of sturdy aluminium and mineral glass, the Porsche P'9521 isn't for the faint hearted, weighing 137g and measuring a somewhat chunky 47mm wide, 90mm tall and 18mm deep.
Inside, this phone packs enough features to scare off any other car-inspired phones -- including a fingerprint reader, which doubles up as touch-sensitive scroll interface for navigating through the menu or your pictures.
On the back, the Porsche P'9521 sports a 3.2-megapixel camera with auto-focus and dual LED photo lights. You can spin the P'9521's screen 180 degrees as you would with a tablet laptop and use the larger main screen as a viewfinder.
Another noteworthy feature is the built-in accelerometer, which lets the phone know which way you're holding it up and changes pictures from portrait to landscape mode automatically, similar to the iPhone.
In the box you get a headphone adaptor to listen to music or make hands-free calls. There's also a 2GB microSD card to store all your pictures of Porche cars and racing soundtracks on.
All in all, we're fairly impressed with it, but we're astonished at the price. For the handset alone you'll have to fork out £800. And while we're sure many Porsche owners won't find that too expensive, we're going to stick with our free-on-contract phones for the time being.
The Porsche P'9521 will be available in November from Carphone Warehouse -- for more details click here, and click through for more photos.
Update: A full review is now available on the site. -Andrew Lim
The inside of the Porsche P'9521 has a Motorola-esque feel to it. We found the keypad okay to use, but it could do with more feedback when you press the keys.
The Porsche P'9521's fingerprint reader lets you access your handset securely, or scroll through the menu or photos by swiping your finger across it.
Flip the Porsche P'9521's screen over and it automatically switches into camera mode. Our first impressions of the 3.2-megapixel camera weren't overwhelming, but it does take good enough photos for messages or small prints.
At 18mm deep, the Porsche P'9521 isn't the thinnest phone out there and the metallic body does make it quite hefty, but feels very well built.
Although the Porsche P'9521 has two LED photo lights, it wasn't as bright as we hoped and didn't illuminate scenes as well as the Sony Ericsson K810i's xenon flash.