Hey fashionistas! Who wants a boring old Nokia when you can pay through the nose for a haute couture handset? That’s what Christian Dior is hoping you’ll think, anyway, with its new line of mobile phones. They’ll cost a whopping 3,500 Euros (about £2,778) when they go on sale this year. They’ve been designed by French firm ModeLabs, and come in several different colours, with built-in cameras and touchscreens. They also have a little mini-phone that clips to your handbag/manbag and functions as some kind of Bluetooth headset, except swankier. The phones will be sold initially in China and Russia, rather than established European and North American countries. Dior reckons it’ll sell 10,000 of them in the first year on sale. Good luck with that.
Tag Archive for 'Modelabs'
Owning a Hummer isn’t quite as cool as it used to be, what with the decaying state of the environment. And it’s especially uncool if you’re only using it to coast through the school-run knowing that if you hit anything up to and including a charging rhino, you’ll come off better. Shame on you. Not least because there aren’t many rhinos in Islington.
What about a Hummer handset, though? That’s not so bad. French firm ModeLabs has just taken the wrappers off its Hummer HT2, which is the follow-up to its first Hummer phone, which went on sale last year. It’s based on the wheels and grille of the real-world Hummer, and offers “a built-in modem, e-mail, and a webcam”. Oh, and you can stick two SIM cards in it for dual-line fun and frolics.
ModeLabs says it’s shifted more than 50,000 of the HT1, thus spurring the follow-up. It’s big in Eastern Europe and Latin America, apparently, which explains why ModeLabs plans to market the HT2 mainly in those areas. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few pop up in certain North London branches of Carphone Warehouse…
Watchmaker TAG Heuer is the latest company to sign up with French design house Modelabs for a series of luxury branded mobiles.
TAG Heuer follows in the footsteps of companies like Hummer and Levi Strauss, in agreeing for phones to be made using its name by Modelabs.
No word on what the phone will look like (will it be a watch phone?), nor which celebrity (or celebrities) including Tiger Woods and Lewis Hamilton will be used to tout the handsets, but no doubt TAG Heuer will want to use them.
The first TAG Heuer will be released near the end of next year, so it seems there’s a long way to go before we see the first one.
[Via Reuters]
Recent Comments