Pocket Picks :: The coolest things for the coolest phones

In the second of today’s motoring-related announcements, Porsche Design has revealed the first fruits of its partnership with France’s Sagem to create a mobile phone: the P’9521. Machined from a solid aluminium block and with a mineral glass outer display, the phone features a double-hinged screen, allowing it to be rotated through 180 degrees. The screen itself is a 2.2″ AMOLED unit with 240 x 320 pixel resolution and support for 262,000 colours.

The phone comes with a fingerprint reader, which can be used to lock not only the entire phone but specific numbers and functions, which is pretty nifty.

Other notable features include a 3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus, flash, digital zoom and both still and video capture, and the usual music playback of all the major formats. Strangely, though, the P’9521 only offers Bluetooth 1.2 and we can’t see a 3.5mm headphone socket anywhere on the case in these photos, so we’re not sure how you’re supposed to listen to your tunes — other than via some kind of dedicated headset. Also odd is that Porsche is only equipping the phone with USB 1.1 while pretty much all mid to high-end phones are fitted with USB 2.0 these days.

With that aluminium and glass design the 91 x 48 x 18.4mm P’9521 weighs in at an unsurprising 140g, which exactly matches Nokia’s equally stylish (and also glass fronted) 8600. No word on pricing as yet but Porsche has said that the quad-band GSM phone will only be available in Europe — which is a bit of a kick in the teeth for its thousands of American fans who buy its cars each year, we think.