14 DAY TRIAL // When I first saw it, I falsely believed this is a moded Blackberry running a Linux Open OS. Actually, it is a smartphone launched by Grundig, a company better known for its sound systems and other gadgets and pieces of hardware related to the audio domain of the electronics market.
But, although it may not have a lot of experience in the mobile phone manufacturing field, they seem to be very good at it as we have seen in the last couple of days.
The B700 Ultra Slim Communicator is a smartphone running on an open software platform and having a design strikingly similar to some BlackBerry handsets to be found on today's mobile market.
It features the same SureType QWERTY keyboard one can find on any BlackBerry, a 2.4 inch 262k colors QVGA TFT display working at a 320x240 pixels resolution, EDGE/GSM quad-band radios (850, 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz), GPRS class 10, modem capability via an USB or a Bluetooth connection, a 2 megapixel digital camera with a CMOS sensor, 4x digital zoom and LED Flash, video streaming capabilities at QCIF resolution, a music player with support for MP3 and AAC files, an FM radio, a POP3 Email Client, 100 MB internal memory, a microSD memory expansion card slot, JAVA MIDP 2.0 technology for the latest games, all packed up in a body only 10 mm thick and weighing only 89 grams.
That spec sheet and its clean, slim design would probably make it a very tough contender for RIM's devices if it weren't for its pretty weak battery life of only two and a half hours.
However, I still think it is a nice effort coming from Grundig if you think about the way they decided to deal with this new challenge: they didn't take the easy way of building a device and stuff it with one of Microsoft's mobile operating systems but, instead, they decided to go all the way and try to make everything from ground up.
The result, despite its striking resemblance with a BlackBerry, is a quite alluring handset, with a software platform rarely to be seen in any of the mobile phones you'll find on the market at the moment and, to make the story short, I think it absolutely deserves a "drive test" to know exactly what it is capable of.
There are no details about its pricing or availability date yet so be sure to check back because we'll keep you posted in case anything new comes up.